Refugio Nursing and Refabilitation

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Our inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's government inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. When determining a facility's nursing score, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients at least once a day.

The next category we analyzed proved to be this nursing home's worst category. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of B- for our short-term care category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more important for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.