Garden Villa Nursing Home

Garden Villa Nursing Home is a large nursing home located in El Campo, Texas. This facility received an overall grade of D, which is a lower end grade. At the end of the day, we would be very reluctant to recommend this facility. Finally, this facility had an ownership change in the last year, so hopefully its performance improves in the coming year.

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to point out its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have too many severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors 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 aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's second highest area ended up being short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. With our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 33.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. The nursing rating weighs a handful of components, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility averages 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is a very low figure. Finally, we also baked some quality-based metrics into our nursing scores. This facility was relatively weak in two of the major areas we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are typically reliable measures of the quality of nursing care offered.

The next area we scored was long-term care, which ended up being a weak link for this facility. We gave this facility a grade of just D in the area of long-term care. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was far less favorable. We found that this facility had 2.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a concerning rate.