Azalea Trail Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Azalea Trail Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is a facility located in Grand Saline, Texas, a city with 6,958 people. We gave this facility an overall grade of C. A score of this caliber requires some respectable marks. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Grand Saline, which admittedly is admittedly a bit below average nationally. The best part of this facility's report card was its remarkable inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS 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.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B+. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.9899 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. The last statistic we assessed is the nursing home's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 1.83 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is close to average in this area.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care score. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 30.6 percent of its residents returning home.

The final category we analyzed is nursing, which was this facility's worst category. It received a lowly F in this category, which is clearly very concerning. In determining our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averaged a meager 1.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.