Sante of North Scottsdale

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this area. Short-term care grades are typically employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. There are a number of subcategories within this grade. Most of these datapoints reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we rated was long-term care. This nursing home received an above average nursing score in our assessment, with a B. While this is not nearly as impressive as many of its other category grades, this is still one of the more impressive scores in that category. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.