Focused Care at Brenham

This nursing home's overall score was propped up by the fact that it has earned favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better scores in that category, with a B+. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we still had a generally positive view of this facility's inspections.

This nursing home's second most favorable category was short-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average grade in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The important question is whether this also impacted quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. When calculating our nursing scores, we analyze both nursing hours 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. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics 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 measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The last category we scored was long-term care, which ended up being a weak spot for this facility. We gave this facility a grade of D for the area of long-term care. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 98.181816 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.