Santa Fe Care Center

This nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. This really salvaged its overall profile. With our short-term care grade, we seek to forge a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an B. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning residents at least once a day.

Sadly, this facility only earned a D for its long-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective 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. After we finished assessing the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 95.16908 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Moving on our final category of inspections, this nursing home received a grade that's as bad as it gets. Unfortunately, with an F in the inspection category, this facility's overall grade was adversely affected. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This particular nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, we need to point out that this place received large government fines in recent years of over $100,000. This often signifies that a facility's poor performance spanned several years.