Retama Manor Nursing Center/Alice

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's long-term care score ended up being one of its respectable features. The facility was awarded a grade of B- in this area. With our long-term care score, we focus more on the sheer volume of care offered by a facility, along with some quality datapoints. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 98.71245 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a score of D. We assessed the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This place averaged only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's worst category is short-term care, which is the final category we looked at. We gave it an abysmal F in this category. Even with a few decent scores in other categories, this grade is still alarming so we would like to to point it out. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is generally a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. With a grade this poor in this category, we weren't shocked to find that this place was well below average in several staffing metrics we focus on. The nursing home provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.