Hays Nursing & Rehab Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, 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. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home also received a positive long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded them a grade of B+ in that area, which is one of our more favorable scores. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care rating. This is not one of our better scores. Short-term care scores are meaningful for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Based on its abysmal score in this area, we weren't surprised to discover this place provided substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This nursing home's worst area was nursing, which is the final area we assessed. It received an abysmal F for this area. In spite of multiple acceptable grades in other areas, this score is still of a concern so we would like to to point it out. The nursing grade assesses quite a few subcategories, but the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. To go along with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility had poor scores in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of patients having falls leading to major injury. This facility was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing grade.