Desert Haven Care Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the facility's recent government inspection reports. We gave it an A- for this category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. 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 an impressively low number.

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 grade looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

Switching gears to our final area, we gave this facility a grade of D in short-term care. This is the nursing home's worst category score. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.