William R Courtney Texas State Veterans Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You really can not do much better than a deficiency-free inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. There are numerous datapoints within this area. Most of the datapoints are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 75.72993 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we expected. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a decent grade in this category, with a B-. While this is not as favorable as many of its other grades, it is still not a poor grade. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.