Southwestern Veterans Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

Compounding its fine profile, this facility also received a superb short-term care grade, with a score of A-. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a high-end long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a B+ in this category, completing one of our finer profiles. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 96.44013 percent of its patients, which is better than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.