Sierra Winds

Sierra Winds is a small non-profit facility located in Peoria, Arizona. It looks like this nursing home is one of the best nursing homes we looked at. A score of this caliber requires superb scores across the board. As a matter of fact, this is one of the top three nursing homes in the city. We also gave this facility strong grades in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. With 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home surpassed the overwhelming majority of facilities. Finally, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home Arizona when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good measures of the caliber of nursing care provided.

Adding to its superb resume, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care area. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for the category. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is considered to be a fair assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. This place excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the typical nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 60.7 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

We gave this facility a score of A for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of B. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 92.5 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.