The Hillcrest of North Dallas

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider 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 always a good sign.

This facility also was given a positive score in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B+ in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.068405 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the area of short-term care, this nursing home was awarded just a D in that area. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Based on its weak rating in this area, we weren't shocked to find that this facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

This nursing home's least impressive category is nursing, which is the last area we analyzed. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area. In spite of a few solid grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless disappointing so we wanted to draw your attention to it. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This particular facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is well below the national average. On top of its below average nursing hour totals, this facility received poor scores in several of the quality-based measures we considered in computing our nursing ratings. We found that more of this facility's patients suffered falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this nursing home receiving a poor nursing rating.