Westward Trails Nursing and Rehabilitation

Westward Trails Nursing and Rehabilitation is an average-sized nursing home in Nacogdoches, Texas. With an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a very poor facility. While the city grade in Nacogdoches which is also just a D, you still should be able to do better. If you aren't deterred by this nursing home's profile, you can continue reading to learn more about its category grades. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

Although we gave this nursing home a horrible overall score, we gave it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that had a long list of deficiencies. While this place had some 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 government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We were also surprised to find that this facility earned a decent long-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.66667 percent of its patients. The last datapoint we looked at is its hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 3.73 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this number can be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

Moving on to the category of short-term care, this facility received just a D in that category. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. With a score in this range in this area, we weren't shocked to discover that this place was well below average in many staffing figures we looked at. In fact, it offered far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 48.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.

The next area we analyzed is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a rock bottom score. There are quite a few criteria within this area. Many of the subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to being below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.