Harlingen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed favorably in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed more favorably in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.70414 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

As it turns out, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care grade, which is not a very good score. Short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We found that this facility was subpar in several staffing metrics we assessed. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 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.

The next area we looked at is nursing, which was this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic dragged down this facility's nursing score substantially.