Country Hills Post-Acute

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of A- for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.81361 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in short-term care, making this its least impressive area. With our short-term care grade, we seek to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. We found that this place was subpar in many staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.3 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.