Focused Care at Lamesa

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's better category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. It actually fared better than most facilities in this category. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the category of short-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in this area. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Given its score in this category, we were not stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The last metric 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 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

This nursing home's weakest category was nursing, which is the last area we analyzed. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area. Even with several acceptable scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we would like to to make sure you are aware. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This place averaged a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is well below average. In addition to its subpar nursing hour totals, this facility received suboptimal marks in many 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 which led to serious injury.