Sundance Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation

Even though we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable short-term care grade this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we found for this nursing home. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.

This facility's second best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. The nursing score considers several datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This facility offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home received a lowly F for its inspection score. This is a very important category. Scores in this range often mean we found some red flags on the nursing home's government inspections. When a place has this poor of an inspection rating, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. This particular facility was assessed 3 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home really didn't fare well in this category either. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the nursing home is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the vaccine to only 66.49746 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.