Meridian Care of Hebbronville

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of C in this category is by no means a bad score. The nursing grade is based on a handful of factors, however, the paramount one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat concerning figure as it is well below average. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The last category we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home was given a strong short-term care score in our assessment, with a C. Even though this is not quite as elite as many of its other category grades, this is still a respectable score for that area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We weren't able to find information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.