Decatur Medical Lodge

Decatur Medical Lodge is a large nursing home located in Decatur, Texas. This facility was given an uninspiring overall grade of D, which is a well below average rating. If you are not satisfied with this facility's low overall grade, you may find you have slim pickings in Decatur. The city has just two other nursing homes. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this facility's report card is its impressive inspection grade. You can scroll down to learn more about inspections and other category scores

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones 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 safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility's long-term care rating is one of its respectable scores. The nursing home received a B- in this area. Long-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of care. This includes a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.723755 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. With 1.72 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility was not too far off the national average.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest score is short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. With a score in this range in this area, we were not stunned to learn this facility was well below average in two of the key staffing areas we looked at. The nursing home provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home a bit in this metric as well, with just 48.6 percent of its patients returning home.

The next category we looked at is nursing. This facility was given a poor grade of F in this area. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 2.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its low total nursing hours per patient, this facility had poor marks in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing falls which led to serious injury. This facility was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is alarming in light of the fact that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing score.