Desoto Retirement & Rehab Ctr

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also earned top notch government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A+. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

In addition, this facility also received favorable long-term care grades this year. Indeed, we awarded them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we graded was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave this nursing home a relatively low score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a D. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we considered. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we graded is nursing, turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this facility a grade of D in this category. This really is one of just a few dings in an otherwise strong profile. The nursing grade is based on quite a few components, however, the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This place averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is well below average. While this nursing home didn't excel in nursing hours, it actually surprised us in some of the quality-based assessments in the nursing category, such as avoiding serious falls. This place performed above average in this datapoint, which was one redeeming quality we found in this category.