Desert Blossom Health & Rehab Center

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this facility also earned top notch government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Among the reasons we rated this facility so well is that it received a favorable short-term care score. In fact, short-term care is its second highest category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A. Our short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Nursing ratings are primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to the last area, this facility was awarded a respectable long-term care grade. Although this isn't quite as good as a few of its other grades, this is still not the end of the world. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to a relatively low 77.85235 percent of its residents, which is several points lower than we expected. Nevertheless, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.