Havasu Regional Medical Center

Havasu Regional Medical Center is one of only three available facilities in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. We awarded this nursing home an overall rating of A+, making it the highest graded nursing home in Lake Havasu City. Based on our assessment, this nursing home is simply as good as it gets. Scroll down to see this place's category scores, which also impressed us. You really can't do much better than a straight A profile.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. With our short-term care grade, we endeavor to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 68 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This score is based on the place's government inspections. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 6.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was one of the highest totals we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home in the state in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided.

Turning to the last area, this facility also was given an A+ long-term care rating, leaving it as one of an elite group of facilities to be awarded straight A+'s. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information about vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.