Garden Terrace at Houston

In addition to earning a strong overall rating, this facility fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an A for this area, which is one of our best grades. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This facility received strong marks in the area of short-term care as well. In fact, we awarded it one of our most favorable scores in that area with a area of A-. Short-term care grades are vital for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. It does not appear that this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. The nursing rating assesses many components, however, the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we assessed is long-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is clearly somewhat disappointing. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 72.881355 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.