The Plaza at Richardson

Even though we did not have many favorable things to say about this nursing home's overall grade, it did receive a slightly better long-term care rating of B-. This enhanced its profile to a degree. Long-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of care. This means a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 98.47716 percent of its residents. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We were also pleasantly surprised to award this facility a relatively favorable inspection rating as well. We awarded it a respectable grade of B- in this category, which was much better than its overall score. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our short-term care scores are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Switching gears to the next category, we gave this facility a D in our nursing category. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. Our nursing grade is primarily based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This place offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its below average total nursing hours per resident, this facility had really bad marks in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents having falls which led to major injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is concerning in light of the fact that so many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.