Austin Trace Health and Rehabilitation

Although we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it earned a very impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that area with a B+. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. In spite of this deficiency, this was still a relatively positive report.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care grade and that actually turned out to be its next most favorable category. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is frequently a solid measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Based on its score in this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. We scrutinized the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we assessed was long-term care, where this nursing home received a rock bottom score in this area as well. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We found that this nursing home gave the vaccine to just 57.295372 percent of its residents, which is somewhat concerning. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.