Brazos Valley Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed favorably in the category of long-term care, with high-end grade of A in this category. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Next we looked at nursing grades, where this nursing home received an F, which is a rock bottom grade. This area was definitely not a strength for this facility. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This place provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we rated was short-term care. It received an F in this area, which is a poor grade. This is obviously a significant disappointment. Short-term care grades are vital for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It looks like this nursing home was below average in several staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.