Sante of Mesa

Sante of Mesa is a small facility located in Mesa, Arizona. This facility is ranked among the highest-rated nursing homes we looked at. Receiving an A+ in our grading system requires superb scores across the board. Even in a city of 11 nursing homes, this facility jumped off the page as a quality selection. Headlining this place's stellar report card is its inspection grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

To pair with a strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. 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.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home fared very well in our short-term care rating. We gave them an exemplary grade of A+ in this area. Our short-term care grades are presumably more critical for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Remarkably, this facility provides approximately 50% more hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a great sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 73 percent of its patients returning home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provides an incredible 5.7 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the nation in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Turning to our final area, this facility also performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category. This completed a straight A profile. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. While we determined this nursing home had a favorable volume of nursing hours provided by aids and other nursing staff, we found its vaccination rate to be somewhat low. It provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 86.95653 percent of its residents. This is a figure we'd love to see this facility improve. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.