Desert Terrace Healthcare Center

Although we didn't grade this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent score in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facilities next best area is short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack score in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Nursing scores are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in this category. Nursing homes that don't score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 76.15894 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.