The Center at Tucson

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this facility an A for inspections. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

To add to its dominant performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A for our short-term care rating. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable long-term care scores this year. In fact, we gave them one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. We were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we scored was nursing. In this area, we awarded this facility a solid grade of B-. This actually proved to be this facility's worst category. The nursing grade is based on a handful of data points, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is not an impressive total. Lastly, we look at quality-based statistics, such as the percentage of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. These metrics are indicators of the quality of nursing care.