Dallas Retirement Village Health Center

Even though we gave this facility a poor overall score, we gave it a fairly respectable grade in nursing, where it received a B-. This was better than its other category scores. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

We also gave this facility a solid score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The critical question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home received mediocre inspections in recent years. We awarded them a C in this category. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This indicates the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent danger to resident safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

The final category we rated is long-term care, which is this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a D in this category. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.32204 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.