Hill Country Rehab and Nursing Center

With an address in Copperas Cove, Texas, Hill Country Rehab and Nursing Center is one of just a couple available nursing homes in the city. Featuring an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a very poor nursing home. This facility is about as bad as it gets. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category is long-term care, which is addressed in the next section.

Even though we graded this facility extremely poorly overall, it earned a better long-term care rating this year. We gave it a C in that area, which is the closest thing to a bright spot we could find for this place. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 95.42254 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 1.41 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Incredibly, we awarded this nursing home a C for our short-term care score, which isn't too bad of a score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is more often than not a solid assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. This place was above average in this metric with 52.5 percent of its residents returning home.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its nursing grade. There are numerous datapoints included in this grade. Many of these datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. In addition to its weak nursing hour totals, this facility also received poor scores in some of the quality-based metrics we considered in computing our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this facility's patients suffered falls leading to major injury. We believe that many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this facility receiving a terrible nursing rating.

Turning the final category of inspections, this facility fared very poorly. It received an F in our inspection category. For places with poor inspection grades, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This nursing home had one category J or K deficiency, which rank among the worst categories of deficiencies. These categories mean that inspectors uncovered a deficiency which puts patient safety or health in imminent jeopardy. Finally, this facility also received a substantiated complaint in the last few years. There seem to be no shortage of reasons to pass on this facility.