Hays Nursing & Rehab Center

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to note its relatively favorable long-term care grade this year. We gave it a B+ in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 96.1039 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. This nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had just 1.49 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Remarkably, this nursing home actually received a good score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Not many nursing homes that were this poor overall earned multiple category grades of this caliber. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Turning to the category of short-term care, this facility received just a D in that area. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Based on its weak score in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place provided far fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that it fared reasonably well in this area, with 50.3 percent of its patients returning home.

The final category we looked at was nursing, which is this facility's weakest category. We awarded this facility a D in that category. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This place provided only 2.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.