Landmark of Desoto

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection ratings are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we had a generally positive view of this nursing home's inspections.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the pack score in the area of long-term care, with a grade of C. Our long-term care scores are more critical for individuals requiring more traditional assistance associated with personal care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care grade, which is not a very good score. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its score in this area, we were not stunned to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected to find. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we analyzed was nursing, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. It received an F in this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. With a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.