Life Care Center of Tucson

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Our nursing grade consists of several factors, most of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

The next area we graded is long-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is a fair grade in this category. In our long-term care assessment, we focus on the volume of services offered by a nursing home, along with a series of quality statistics. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinates 95.918365 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.