Hill Country Nursing and Rehab

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a B in this area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 98.47716 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Our third category we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility was given an F. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With its score in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility didn't perform very well. Due to a poor grade of F in nursing, this was its weakest area. We looked at the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This place offered just 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of its weak nursing hours, this facility also earned poor scores in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that more of this nursing home's patients experienced falls leading to serious injury.