Desoto Healthcare Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report, which is still very impressive. One deficiency is not anything to panic about.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with a score of B. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is generally a meaningful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our third area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 98.22064 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. 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 a remarkably low figure.

The last category we analyzed is nursing. We gave it a B- in this category. This is a fair grade in this area. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a low total compared with most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.