Carechoice of Boerne

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home 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 tells you that the government inspectors did not 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.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it was awarded an above average long-term care score. Indeed, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this place 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.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing rating is based on numerous datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Switching gears to the next category, this facility was awarded a decent short-term care score of C. In computing these short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.