Spanish Meadows of Brownsville

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's better category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.67742 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of D. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular facility provided a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This number is quite a bit below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we scored is short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's worst category. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is obviously a major concern. Our short-term care scores are believed to be more meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this facility provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.