Colonial Tyler Care Center

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we did give it an excellent score in the area of inspections, where it received an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of this facility's higher category grades came in the area of long-term care. This ended up being its second most favorable category. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility gave the vaccine to just 87.128716 percent of its patients. The last datapoint we assessed is the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this place had a relatively high 3.11 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Neither its vaccination record nor its hospitalization rate were strengths for this place in this category.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. The nursing grade consists of a handful of subcategories, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this area. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.

The next category we scored is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given an abysmal score in this area also. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is obviously somewhat alarming. In computing these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. With its grade in this category, we were not surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 40.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.