Garden Terrace Alzheimer's Center of Excellence

Garden Terrace Alzheimer's Center of Excellence is an average-sized nursing home located in Houston, Texas. This facility appears to be one of the higher-rated nursing homes we assessed. A grade of this caliber requires first-rate scores across the board. We were not surprised to discover that this turned out to be substantially better than many of the nursing homes in Houston. This nursing home's strong report card was highlighted by its short-term care rating, which you can find in the next section.

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Texas in this area with 60.7 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home has received near flawless inspections recently. We awarded them an A in this category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are with patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This place provides an incredible 4.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of that total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this place also performed well in many of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the percentage of its patients sustaining falls leading to major injury, this nursing home outpaced the national average.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable grade in this category, with a grade of C. Even though this isn't as high as many of its other scores, it is still not a poor grade. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the above average volume of care provided by nurses and other staff at this facility, we also were happy with the facility's vaccination statistics. By way of example, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.10145 percent of its patients, which is an impressive total. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.