F W Huston Medical Center

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home has received near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones 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 health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was strong in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Not many nursing homes fared better in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.540985 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are with patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to the final category, this facility received a strong short-term care score. Although this isn't nearly as elite as several of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our stronger grades a facility can receive. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.