Cottonwood Canyon Healthcare Center

While this nursing home earned a decent overall rating, its inspections rating is notably better than its overall score. Due to a strong government inspection report this year, it earned one of our better scores in that area with a B+. Our inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility also was given a favorable grade in our short-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B+ in that category. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.2 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. There are a variety of factors included in this grade. Many of the datapoints are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next area we graded is long-term care, is this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.