Quality Care of Waco

This nursing home really excelled in long-term care, with a grade of A- in this area. This really propped up its overall grade quite a bit. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.08917 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's second best category grade came in the area of government inspections. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this facility an D. Our nursing rating weighs a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is an abysmal score. This is obviously a major concern. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Considering its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.