Lampasas Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors 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 an excellent sign.

This facility fared well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a score of A for that category, which turns out to be one of our better scores. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third area we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B- in this area. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most critical for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last datapoint we looked at 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 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

This nursing home's worst category is nursing, which is the final category we looked at. In this area, we awarded this facility a D. We weighed the skill-level of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. While this nursing home's nursing hours were below average, it surprised us in a few of the qualitative metrics in this category. In particular, we were pleased to find that its patients are suffering fewer pressure ulcers than the national average.