Friendship Village Sunset Hills

One of the reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded a first-rate short-term care score. In fact, this ended up being this nursing home's second strongest category score. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A-. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We weren't able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home was given a high-end score of A- in our long-term care area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 97.70115 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we analyzed was nursing. This facility was awarded a favorable nursing grade this year, with a grade of B-. Even though this is not quite as elite as many of its other grades, this is still an acceptable rating in that area. We weighed the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this area. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.