The Center at Tucson

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

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 favorable grade of B. Our nursing grade assesses a handful of data points, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.