Focused Care at Cedar Bayou

While we were not very complementary of this nursing home's overall score, it received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means 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 minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a respectable grade in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of C. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is generally a useful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We awarded this facility just a D for our long-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home really did not fare very well in this category either. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.