Sienna Hills Nursing & Rehabilitation

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our higher scores in that category, with an A. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our inspection ratings are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's next highest category ended up being its short-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of C. In computing these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we scored is nursing. We awarded this facility a D in our nursing category, rendering this the nursing home's worst area. Nursing grades are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.