Levelland Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Inspection scores are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider 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 always a good sign.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was awarded positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest score. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.4375 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility received its third best category score in the category of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of C in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable score. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility's weakest area is nursing, which is the last area we looked at. We gave it a lowly F in this area. In spite of multiple respectable grades in other areas, this score is still of a concern so we would like to to make a note of it. The nursing grade considers a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This metric helped pull down this facility's nursing rating significantly.