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 always a good sign.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received a great long-term care score. In fact, we gave it one of our best scores in this area with a grade of A-. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.969696 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's second lowest category is short-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Given its weak rating in this area, we weren't shocked to find that this facility provided substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.

The next category we graded is nursing, which is this nursing home's weakest area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is clearly concerning. In determining a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This place performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.