Ballinger Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this nursing home also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in this area, with an A+. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility really excelled in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 77.38095 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a bit less than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. When computing our nursing scores, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home was given a grade of C for short-term care, which is a respectable score. With our short-term care rating, we seek to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.