Jeffrey Place Healthcare Center

Jeffrey Place Healthcare Center is an average-sized nursing home located in Waco, Texas. This nursing home received an overall grade of C, which is a solid grade. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Waco, which is admittedly a bit below average nationally. Lastly, this facility had an ownership change in the last year, so we will need to take a closer look to see how new ownership affects this facility's performance measures.

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that category, with a grade of A. This is a notably better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that 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.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable grades. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. This facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.42 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

The next area we graded was short-term care. This nursing home's was given an abysmal short-term care score where it was given an F. Short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. With its abysmal rating in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home provides far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 42.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

The next category we graded was nursing. We gave it an F in this category, which is an abysmal score. This is obviously a major concern. There are a variety of factors within this area. Many of the criteria are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged only 3.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This place was above average in two of the major data points we considered, with good marks for avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are often good measures of the quality of nursing care offered.