The Phoenix Post-Acute

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it a grade of A. Our inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this facility a middle of the pack score in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of B-. For patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average datapoint. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the category of short-term care, this facility received just a D in that category. Our short-term care scores are critical for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.8 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.

This facility's least impressive category was nursing, which is the last area we scored. We gave it an F for this category. In spite of multiple decent grades in other categories, this score is still of a concern so we would like to to point it out. The nursing rating includes a handful of components, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place had bad marks in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing falls leading to major injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing score.