F W Huston Medical Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this place a grade of A+ for our inspection category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many dominant scores, this nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that area. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.52066 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home received a favorable short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. In determining these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last category we scored was nursing. This facility was awarded a very good nursing grade this year, with a grade of B. Although this is not nearly as strong as several of its other scores, this remains one of the more favorable grades for this category. Nursing ratings are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.