Focused Care at Pecos

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received a great long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it one of our highest grades in that area with a grade of A-. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also awarded this facility a decent score in the area of short-term care, with a grade of C. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

The final category we analyzed was nursing, which proved to be this facility's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. We assessed the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.