Gonzales Healthcare Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

In addition, we also would like to point out that this facility was given favorable long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest grade. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 92.20339 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we expected but still a respectable percentage. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Unfortunately, this facility's third best category was short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared somewhat badly. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Given its score in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we looked at. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

The last area we rated is nursing, which was a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this nursing home a D for our nursing category. Our nursing score is largely associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.