Mineral Wells Nursing & Rehabilitation

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. Inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also received a positive score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in this area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's second lowest category is short-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a relatively poor grade. In our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to craft a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Given its score in this category, we were not surprised to find that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.

This nursing home's weakest area was nursing, which is the last area we looked at. It received a lowly F for this area. In spite of multiple acceptable grades in other areas, this grade is still concerning so we wanted to make a note of it. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. To pair with its below average total nursing hours per patient, this nursing home had bad scores in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing falls which led to serious injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.