Highland Springs

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A-. Our nursing rating is based on a handful of components, however, the most important one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a resident more often.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. Contributing to its dominant resume, this facility also excelled in that area. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A- for that category. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 37.931034 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final area, this facility also received a very strong short-term care grade, with a B+. This completed an elite report card. Short-term care grades are typically used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.