Desert Cove Nursing Center

Desert Cove Nursing Center is an average-sized nursing home located in Chandler, Arizona. We gave this facility a rock bottom overall rating based on the data we looked at. Chandler received a more impressive city grade of B+, so there are far better options in the city worth considering. More information on this facility's category grades is available below. Its best category was inspections, which is addressed in the next section.

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Surprisingly, we gave this nursing home a grade of B- for our short-term care score, which is not a bad grade. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is more often than not a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. In addition to performing well in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it also fared well in this metric with 71.9 percent of its residents returning home.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. The nursing rating assesses several factors, but the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this facility's nursing rating significantly.

This facility's worst area is long-term care, which is the final category we assessed. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of D. In a long-term care setting, the 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 amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.