Rowlett Health and Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection score. Inspections turned out to be its best category. In this area, we awarded it a grade of A. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Another quality feature for this facility is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care grade. Indeed, this turned out to be its second best category score. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Our next category is short-term care, in which we awarded this facility a B- in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. We were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.