Zion of Alamo Heights

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a C for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection ratings are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care score and that actually turned out to be its next most favorable category. In computing these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we learned that this facility offers far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. Our nursing score weighs many components, however, the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This place averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is well below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Turning to the fourth category, this nursing home really did not perform very well here either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.72131 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable figure. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.