Desoto Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. This score is far better than the facility's overall rating. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was awarded a positive grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B in that area. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing rating. We gave this facility an impressive grade of D. There are numerous criteria included in this category. Most of these subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This number is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next category we graded was short-term care, which ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most important for people in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. It appears that this place was subpar in two of the key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.