Legacy at Town Creek

Legacy at Town Creek is a large government-owned facility in Palestine, Texas. With a bottom of the barrel overall grade of F, this facility isn't high on our list. If you are not happy with this facility's pedestrian overall grade, you may find your options to be limited in Palestine. The city has just three other nursing homes. If you aren't deterred by this place's report card, you can continue reading to find out about its category grades. We discuss inspections in the next section.

Although we gave this place a terrible overall score, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections rating. This is the result of the facility receiving a quality government inspection report this year. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have a long list of deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facility also didn't fare too badly in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of C in that category, which turned out to be another one of its more favorable grades. In our long-term care category, we focus on the amount of care provided by a nursing home, as well as some quality metrics. One of the datapoints we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.83022 percent of its patients. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 2.57 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure was less favorable than its other scores in this category.

This nursing home also didn't perform poorly in the category of short-term care. In fact, we gave it a C in that area, which turned out to be another one of its better scores. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. It fared respectably with 48.7 percent of its residents returning home.

Turning to the next category, this facility did not fare very well in this category either. Due to an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is just about as bad as it gets. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home averages 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.