Country Hills Post-Acute

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned an elite long-term care grade. We gave it one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's recent inspections. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that area. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating considers numerous factors. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient more often.

The next category we assessed was short-term care, which was this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile to some degree. Short-term care grades are typically used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last item we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.