Desoto Retirement & Rehab Ctr

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. Inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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. Based on this, we had a generally positive view of this nursing home's inspections.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this facility received favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in this category, with a B+. This turned out to be the nursing home's second highest grade. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this nursing home was given just a D in that area. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to forge a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next area we looked at was nursing. It received a lowly F in this category, which is a very poor score. This is obviously a major concern. In determining our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provided a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This place performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.