The Rio at Las Estancias

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received impressive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second best grade. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. We were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also was given a strong grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.281784 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to our next category, this nursing home was awarded a decent nursing grade of C. Our nursing score features several data points. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.