Cottonwood Creek Healthcare Community

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. Our inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Another one of this facility's higher category grades was in the category of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B. It actually outpaced most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. When calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of our quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this statistic.

The last category we graded is long-term care. For that category, we awarded this facility a grade of C. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 98.36957 percent of its residents. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.