The Forum at Tucson

In addition to being an elite facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Very few nursing homes performed this well in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A+. The nursing rating considers many factors. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 0.7 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also was elite in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of A. Very few nursing homes performed better in this category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't 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 residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to our next category, this nursing home received a very strong short-term care score. We awarded it a grade of A in this area, rounding out a straight A profile. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.