Ventana by Buckner

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing rating consists of many components, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more frequently.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning our third category, this facility was awarded a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A in that category. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Finally, this nursing home also received excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in the area of inspections, with an impressive grade of A. Few other facilities received an A- or better in every category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.