Advanced Health Care of Albuquerque

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility received an A+ for short-term care. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. It offered about 1.5 times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in New Mexico in this area with 74.7 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A-. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this area. This particular nursing home provided 5.8 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was one of the better totals we found. In addition, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the nation when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as good measures of the quality of nursing care offered.

Racking up yet another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it earned an A-. Few facilities fared better in this category. Our inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility was given a highly favorable long-term care score. Even though this was not quite as impressive as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive grades a facility can receive. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.