Arizona State Veteran Home-Phx

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Moving on our next category, this facility was awarded first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this area. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home's least impressive category is long-term care, which is the last category we assessed. In this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. We want to to point out this potential weak link, however, you shouldn't focus exclusively on a single bad category either. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility gave the vaccine to 95 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable figure. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.