Lifestream at Cook Health Care

With an address in Youngtown, Arizona, Lifestream at Cook Health Care is one of just a few facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of A, this facility is among the most elite facilities we looked at. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top quarter of all facilities in the United States. Headlining this facility's exemplary report card is its inspection reports, which you can find in the next section.

To go along with its favorable overall score, we awarded this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A-. Very few facilities performed better in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is considered to be a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This proved to be a real strength for this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 60.8 percent of its patients returning home. This is a far higher rate than most nursing homes.

In our last category, this nursing home also received an impressive long-term care rating, with a grade of B+. This topped off a very favorable report card. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.