Mirador

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility received an A+ inspection grade. This grade is based on its recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its fine resume, this facility also was awarded an excellent short-term care grade, with a grade of A. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this nursing home received a dominant grade of A in our long-term care category. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 51.64835 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a very strong nursing rating. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.