La Hacienda Healthcare

La Hacienda Healthcare is an average-sized facility located in Harlingen, Texas. With an overall grade of B-, this is likely a middle of the road facility. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Harlingen. This facility is better in some categories than others, but it did not have any bad scores in any of the major categories discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the area of long-term care, we awarded this facility a score of A- in that category. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. This place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.17 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a significantly better hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.

This facility's next most favorable category ended up being its short-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of C. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home performed better in this statistic. It performed better than most nursing homes in this metric with 50.7 percent of its residents returning home.

The next area we scored was nursing. We gave this facility a C in this category. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility was above average in two of the major data points we assessed, with good scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.