Frank M Tejeda Texas State Veterans Home

This nursing home's overall grade was bolstered by the fact that it has received favorable health inspections in recent years. We gave them a strong score in that category, with a B+. This is a much better score than the nursing home's overall score. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. 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 had favorable view of this nursing home's inspections.

We also gave this nursing home a respectable grade in the area of short-term care, where it received a B-. Short-term care grades are typically employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing grade analyzes quite a few components, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The next category we graded was long-term care. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. Our long-term care scores are more important for those requiring more traditional services associated with activities of daily living. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.