Sombrillo Nursing Facility

We awarded this facility one of our better scores in the area of short-term care, where it earned a grade of A. This is far better than the facility's overall grade, which was certainly not elite. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. This place performed as well as just about any facility in New Mexico with 60.2 percent of its residents returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place boasts an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, of which more than one hour of these were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The third area we graded was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B- in this area. Our long-term care scores are more critical for folks requiring more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. On top of impressive nursing hour statistics, this facility's vaccination data is above average as well. Indeed, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. With 1.96 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home is not too far off the national average.

The last category we assessed is inspections. Unfortunately, we were surprised to find that this nursing home did not receive a favorable inspection score. We gave it a just D in this area. Clearly, this score is not on par with some of this facility's other grades. Inspection ratings relate to a facility's government inspection reports. Since this information is collected by independent inspectors, we weight it pretty heavily. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. Generally, you should be more cautious when considering a nursing home with severe deficiencies on its inspection reports. This nursing home had 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, we want to point out that this facility was assessed significant government fines in recent years exceeding $50,000. This often means that government inspectors became fed up after several years of bad health inspections.