The Heights of Tyler

This facility's overall grade was helped by a strong long-term care rating. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B. This is a notably better grade than its overall score. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 97.1831 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Surprisingly, this facility actually received a good score in inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better grades. We believe that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. The nursing score includes many factors, but the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did well in this area. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last category we assessed. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. Short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. With a grade this poor for this area, we were not stunned to learn this nursing home was well below average in many staffing figures we looked at. In fact, it supplied substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.