Fort Stockton Living & Rehabilitation

Although this place's overall score was terrible, it performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which ended up being one of its higher category grades. In our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

In our next category, we gave this facility an F in the category of long-term care. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The next category we scored was nursing. We gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. Our nursing grade weighs a handful of data points, however, the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.