Taos Living Center

Even though we didn't give this facility a favorable overall grade, we actually gave it a strong grade in our short-term care category, where it received a B. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B. In calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both staffing levels and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our long-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 99.6063 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this ended up being this facility's weakest link. We gave it a D in this area. Since this information is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our assessment. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed a category J or K deficiency, which are among the worst deficiencies. This generally means that CMS uncovered a deficiency which puts resident safety or health in immediate jeopardy. Finally, this facility also received 8 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.