St. Joseph Health Burleson

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home was awarded its next best category grade in the category of short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of B- in this category, which is an acceptable grade. Short-term care grades are critical for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes 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. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

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. The nursing category is based on several datapoints, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Our last area is long-term care, in which we gave this facility a grade of C in that category. For residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the data points we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 97.11538 percent of its residents. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.