Bluebonnet Nursing and Rehabilitation

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's next best area is its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a C. With our long-term care grade, we look at the volume of care provided by a nursing home, along with a few qualitative measures. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.37107 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. In computing our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care, was this facility's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a D in that area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.