Juniper Village at Lincoln Heights

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for its short-term care rating. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Our nursing grade is largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more frequently.

This nursing home also fared very well in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this category. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our inspection category, it appears this facility has received quality inspections in recent years as well. We gave it a B in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.