Lbj Medical Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this facility an A for its inspection grade. This score is far better than the facility's overall grade. Inspection scores weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also was given a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded them a B in this area, which happens to be one of our better. For long-term care residents, the facility'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 amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 93.15068 percent of its residents. This is a bit below what we expected but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility's third highest score is short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively badly. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. With a score in this range for this category, we were not surprised to learn this facility was below average in the two key staffing figures we looked at. The facility supplied substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The final item we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

The last category we analyzed was nursing. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is a rock bottom grade. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This facility averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. On top of receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.