Mid Valley Nursing & Rehabilitation

Mid Valley Nursing & Rehabilitation is the sole option we found in Mercedes, Texas. We awarded it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the pack score. You can certainly do worse than this nursing home. The best part of this nursing home's report card was is its inspection rating. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section.

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent government inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is certainly a great sign for the quality of care at this nursing home.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.2647 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. While it had 2.37 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was close to the middle of the pack since it had some more complex patients.

The third area we assessed is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is often a reliable measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. It fared much better in this metric with 63.1 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The final category we looked at was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is a poor score. This is clearly a major concern. Our nursing grade analyzes quite a few data points, many of which are based on nursing hours. This particular place offered just 3.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This number is significantly below the national average. On top of its below average nursing hours, this nursing home earned suboptimal scores in many of the quality-based metrics we considered in determining our nursing scores. We found that more of this facility's residents sustained falls which led to serious injury. We believe that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this nursing home receiving a poor nursing score.