Wisteria Place

Wisteria Place is in Abilene, Texas. The city offers a multitude of available nursing homes. Featuring an overall score of B, this appears to be a good facility. Based on our ratings, you can do much worse than this facility. The best aspect of this facility's strong report card was its inspection grade. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is associated with the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the 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 relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a favorable short-term care score. In fact, short-term care ended up being its second highest category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for those needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. One reason for this nursing home's impressive grade in this category is that it provides a significantly larger volume of physical therapist hours to its patients than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 70.2 percent of its patients returning home.

The next category we analyzed is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B- in this area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 94.28571 percent of its residents. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.99 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we assessed was nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Naturally, this category hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. The nursing rating is based on several subcategories. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided a meager 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Although this facility's nursing hours were below average, it actually surprised us in a few of the qualitative statistics in this category. In particular, we were pleased to see that its patients are sustaining fewer pressure ulcers than most nursing homes.