Alta Mesa Health and Rehabilitation

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility also was given a impressive short-term care grade. This actually is this facility's second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. The nursing grade features a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning patients at least once a day.

The last area we scored is long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of B-. This was this facility's least impressive category. This is still not a poor grade. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to find this place's vaccination data. Finally, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.