Alamo Heights Health and Rehabilitation Center

Although we gave this nursing home a horrible overall score, we awarded it a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with too many severe deficiencies flagged. This nursing home was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care score and that actually turned out to be its second highest score. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most critical for patients needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

In addition, we gave this nursing home an F in the area of long-term care. Nursing homes that don't score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home gave the vaccine to just 83.28691 percent of its residents, which is well below average. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility did not perform well in this category either. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is really as bad as it gets. We looked at the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This place offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This facility also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is likely a bad sign in light of the fact that so many pressure ulcers could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.