Royal Plaza Health & Rehabilitation

Even though we gave this facility an abysmal overall score, we awarded it a grade of B- for our nursing rating. In determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of skill of the nurses. 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. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Surprisingly, we awarded this nursing home a C for our short-term care grade, which really isn't a bad grade. Our short-term care grades are arguably most critical for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that just 3.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

Among this place's worst category grades was a lowly F for its inspection rating. Typically, this indicates we found red flags on the facility's government inspection reports. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We suggest you pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This particular facility had a deficiency by CMS. Fortunately, it was not in one of the categories that suggest that it posed a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years of more than $100,000. This typically means that a bad performance spanned several years.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. This facility was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means the facility didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 87.94326 percent of its patients. This is multiple points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.