Country Hills Post-Acute

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Few nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it earned an A+ nursing score. This is as good as it gets in this category. The nursing rating is based on a host of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility provided 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.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility really did not perform well. With a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this is this nursing home's weakest grade. With our short-term care score, we seek to forge a valuable barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. It appears that this place was subpar in multiple staffing metrics we looked at. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.6 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.