The Rio at Las Estancias

On top of faring well overall, this nursing home received even higher grades in the category of short-term care. It received one of our best grades in that category with A-. In calculating these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It earned a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that category with a score of A-. Few nursing homes with an overall score in this range performed as well in multiple categories. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Additionally, this facility also received favorable long-term care scores this year. In fact, we gave it one of our stronger grades in that category, with a grade of B. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we analyzed is nursing. In this category, we awarded this facility a decent grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also considered a few quality-based metrics in this category. While this nursing home didn't rank highly in terms of nursing hours per resident, it fared much better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than average. This is usually an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided with better nursing care.