Hi-Desert Medical Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our nursing category. We gave it an A for that category. The nursing grade features a number of subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

Among its many impressive grades, this nursing home was given first-rate short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that area. In the area of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an impressive grade of B+ for that category, which is among our highest scores. Inspection scores are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

The last area we rated is long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of B-. This actually was this facility's weakest area. Our long-term care grades are based on a facility's volume of care. This means a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 84.97268 percent of its patients. This is pretty significantly lower than average. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps 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.