Haven of Cottonwood

We awarded this nursing home an A in the short-term care category. In our short-term care grade, we try to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We would also like to draw your attention to this nursing home's strong inspection grade. This facility earned a B in this category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home received its next best category score in the category of long-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a decent grade. In determining these long-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's personal care services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable total. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we graded was nursing, which is this facility's worst area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is obviously a major concern. The nursing grade includes several components, but the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below average. In addition to performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home also had rock bottom marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at more than twice the national average in both of these metrics. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this facility's fate of earning a very poor nursing rating.