Focused Care of Waxahachie

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better scores in that category, with an A. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also was given a strong score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B in that area. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category turned out to be short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care scores are important for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It does not look like this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

The last area we graded is nursing. We gave this facility a C in that area. Our nursing rating is mostly based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed well in this subcategory. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a resident more often.