Palo Duro Nursing Home

This facility fared well in the area of long-term care, where it received an A-. Few facilities fared better in this area. If it wasn't for this category, this facility's overall grade would have been worse. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.57365 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Surprisingly, this nursing home actually earned a good score in inspections as well. We awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection grades weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

The third category we assessed is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last area we rated was nursing, ended up being this nursing home's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in that area. The nursing score assesses quite a few factors, however, the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.