Lubbock Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

The second most favorable area we gave this facility in any category came in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a B-. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest score is short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we learned that this nursing home offers substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the final category, this facility did not perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this was this facility's poorest category grade. There are a variety of factors included in this grade. Most of the subcategories reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This place offered just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this place also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing score quite a bit.