Cottonwood Nursing and Rehabilitation

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in this area with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a positive grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility an above average grade of B+ in this category. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 94.5946 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's second least favorable category was short-term care, where it received just a D in that category. This is a relatively poor grade. Our short-term care ratings are important for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this place's case, it looks like it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we looked at was nursing. It received a lowly F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a significant disappointment. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is not a very impressive figure. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.