Port Lavaca Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem 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 an excellent sign.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care. In fact, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which happens to be one of our highest grades. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.1453 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this nursing home only received a D for its short-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. Our short-term care grades are critical for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing. This includes a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we looked at. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below average.

The next category we looked at is nursing. It received an abysmal F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is certainly a major disappointment. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its weak nursing hours, this nursing home also received suboptimal scores in some of the quality-based measures we considered in determining our nursing scores. We found that a higher percentage of this facility's patients suffered falls leading to major injury.