Kendall House Wellness & Rehabilitation

Kendall House Wellness & Rehabilitation is a facility located in Boerne, Texas, a city with 37,160 people. This nursing home received an A- overall, which is one of the best grades that we offer. A score of this caliber requires superb scores across the board. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top quarter of all nursing homes in the nation. This place's impressive report card was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

In addition to earning a great overall score, this facility received an A+ in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care scores are presumably most critical for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a nursing home in this category. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in this area with 65.4 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings aren't the end of the world.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. Our nursing score considers several factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided 4.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is among the better figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by these figures. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home was given an acceptable long-term care grade. Even though this is not as strong as several of its other grades, this is still not the end of the world. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. On top of providing above average levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.17 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a significantly lower hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.