Cedar Hill Healthcare Center

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility's next highest score is long-term care, but it nevertheless received just a D in that area. This is still a relatively poor grade. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 94.42509 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The third area we graded is short-term care. This facility's was given a poor short-term care grade where it received a lowly F. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is frequently a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Given its score in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home.

The final category we scored is nursing. It received an abysmal F in this area, which is a poor grade. Nursing scores are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provided a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.