Foothills Rehabilitation Center

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home has earned excellent inspections recently. We gave them an A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our better scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grades are important for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

In the last area, we gave this facility an A for our long-term care grade. This topped off a very favorable report card. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.