Balch Springs Nursing Home

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for its inspection grade. This score is far better than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose 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 next most favorable category is short-term care. We awarded it a B- in this area. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is more often than not a meaningful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's assistance with daily living rather than the skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we assessed was nursing, which is a weak spot for this facility. We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our nursing category. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its low nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this measure.