The Legacy at Willow Bend

The Legacy at Willow Bend is located in Plano, Texas. This city is one of the largest cities in the country with has a population of 278,067 people. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the highest-rated facilities we assessed. A grade in this range requires top-notch scores across the board. This facility turned out to be one of the better nursing homes in the city, which has a strong selection of facilities. We also gave this nursing home strong ratings in all of our categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 66.5 percent of its residents returning home.

In addition, this facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with a score of A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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.

This facility also fared very well in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of A. Very few facilities performed better in this category. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of offering elite levels of nursing care, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. This combination proved to be successful as this facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.13 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a much better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility was awarded a highly favorable nursing rating. We awarded it a grade of B+ in this area, completing one of our finer profiles. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility boasts a really impressive 5.6 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this facility performed as well as any nursing home Texas. Avoiding major falls is generally an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses and better safety protocols are employed.