El Paso Health & Rehabilitation Center

Although we didn't rate this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent score in the area of inspections, where it received an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facilities second best category was long-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This place provided a meager 3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is an alarmingly low total. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. We gave it an F in this category, which is a very poor score. In crafting these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. With a grade in this range for this area, we weren't shocked to find that this nursing home was well below average in several staffing metrics we looked at. The nursing home offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last area we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This place fared better in this area, with 49.2 percent of its patients returning home. This was just about this nursing home's only redeeming quality in this category.