Walnut Springs Health & Rehabilitation

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category scores was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. There are quite a few subcategories within this grade. Many of these datapoints relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Moving on to our fourth category, we awarded this nursing home a D for the area of short-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category score. Of course, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. In determining our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below average.