Chinle Nursing Home

This nursing home really excelled in the category of long-term care, where it received an A. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.1831 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong grade in our short-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in that area. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. It does not appear that this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The last category we assessed is inspections. This nursing home did not receive favorable inspection reports in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F in this category. This pulled down this facility's overall grade significantly. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection rating. We recommend you scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This facility was assessed one category J through K deficiency, which are among the worst deficiencies. Finally, we also need to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a nursing home's bad track record spanned several years.