Friendship Village of Tempe

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many elite grades, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that area. Our short-term care ratings are important for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The third category we analyzed is long-term care. Adding to its dominant resume, this nursing home also performed well in that area. In fact, we gave it a of A for the area. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The fourth area we analyzed was nursing, where this nursing home was given a grade of A-. This wrapped up a very strong profile. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or better in all four categories. We analyzed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.