Retama Manor Nursing Center/Edinburg

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this nursing home performed well in inspections, where it earned an A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its high-end performance in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A for its long-term care score. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next category we rated was nursing, where this facility was awarded a grade of B. This actually ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when their worst grade still outperforms most facilities. When determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.