Santa Fe Lodge

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really fared well in our long-term care category, where it received an impressive grade of A-. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating is mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The third area we graded was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of B-. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

In the last area we looked at, we found that this facility received a solid government inspection report this year as well. As a result, it received a decent score in our inspection category with a B-. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.