The Palms Nursing and Rehabilitation

The Palms Nursing and Rehabilitation is a very-large facility located in Corpus Christi, Texas. Featuring an overall score of F, we consider this to be a lower end facility. Based on our analysis, this facility probably isn't a good fit for anyone. We wouldn't blame you if you are ready to stop reading and find another nursing home. However, if you want to learn more about this facility's category grades, we will discuss long-term care in the next section.

This facility ended up receiving rock bottom scores in our assessment. Perhaps most alarmingly, it received an F for its long-term care grade. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 98 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.36 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Among this facility's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection grade. More often than not, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. For places that received this bad of an inspection score, we would scrutinize the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home was hit with one category J through K deficiency, which are among the worst categories of deficiencies. These categories mean that inspectors uncovered a deficiency which places resident safety or health in immediate danger. Finally, we want to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines recently of over $50,000. This typically suggests that CMS inspectors became fed up after several years of bad inspections.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing rating includes many factors, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. This nursing home also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its low nursing hours. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this area. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.

The final area we rated was short-term care. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is a poor grade. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. With a grade in this range in this category, we were not shocked to find this place was below average in many staffing metrics we looked at. The facility offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 28 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.