Southwest Healthcare Services

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed this well in this area. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing rating is based on several subcategories. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Contributing to its first-rate assessment, this facility also received a superb long-term care score, with a grade of A. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In our final category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our short-term care grade. This topped off an elite profile. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.