Weslaco Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS 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 lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was given positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second best grade. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the road score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a C. Our short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last item we looked at 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 5.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The final category we rated was nursing. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a rock bottom score. This is clearly a major disappointment. There are a host of factors included in this area. Many of the factors are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. On top of its weak nursing hours, this facility also earned suboptimal marks in some of the quality-based measures we considered in determining our nursing grades. We found that more of this place's residents suffered falls leading to major injury.