Sante of Mesa

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility an elite grade of A+ for its short-term care rating. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the 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.

Turning the page to our next area, this facility was given first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final category, we gave this nursing home an A for our nursing rating. This finished off a very impressive report card. When determining our nursing ratings, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home Arizona in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients more often.