The Center at Tucson

The Center at Tucson is an average-sized nursing home located in Tucson, Arizona. We awarded this facility an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the United States. Even in a city with 22 other nursing homes, this nursing home stood out. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a strong short-term care grade. This actually is its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A. Short-term care grades are often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Arizona in this area with 67.2 percent of its patients returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Compounding its high-end assessment, this facility also received a superb long-term care score, with a grade of A-. For patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we graded is nursing, where this nursing home was given a B-. This is this facility's least impressive area. This is still not the end of the world. There are quite a few data points included in this category. Many of these data points relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was well above average. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both impressive figures. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Arizona in this category. This is usually a accurate measure of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.