Palomino Place

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this nursing home is that it received an above average long-term care grade. Indeed, this wound up being its second best category grade. In this category, we awarded this facility a B+. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third category we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home was given a favorable short-term care grade, with a grade of B in this area. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more than 50% more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Texas in this area with 59.3 percent of its residents returning home.

Turning to our final area, this nursing home received an acceptable nursing rating. While this wasn't quite as strong as a few of its other scores, this is still not the end of the world. Our nursing grade analyzes quite a few components, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a low total compared with most facilities. Finally, although this nursing home didn't rank well in terms of nursing hours per resident, it performed better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the number of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, this facility fared better than the national average.