Palestine Healthcare Center

Neither this facility's overall grade nor its category grades gave us much to write home about. Its best category was long-term care, but even there it received just a D. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 99.50495 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the area of short-term care. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Based on its abysmal score in this area, we weren't shocked to discover this place provides substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Among this nursing home's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection rating. Generally, this means we found some red flags on the nursing home's inspection reports. When a nursing home has this poor of an inspection score, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to resident health or safety. 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 area we rated was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. The nursing rating is based on quite a few subcategories, but the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were well below average. To go along with its low total nursing hours per patient, this place had bad scores in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents having falls which led to major injury. This facility was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.