The Highlands of Dallas

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this nursing home a positive grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B in this category, which turns out to be one of our better grades. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 95.27273 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Sadly, this facility's next best category was short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed somewhat badly. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is its weakest category grade. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are with patients and the skill levels 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. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.