Schleicher County Medical Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 65.789474 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is somewhat lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Nursing grades are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also received favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The last area we rated was short-term care. We awarded this facility a solid score in that area, with a grade of C. Although this wasn't as strong as several of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless not a bad grade. Our short-term care ratings are presumably most meaningful for people in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.