Garden Terrace Alzheimer's Center of Excellence

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing rating is mostly based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a resident even once per day.

This facility also was awarded a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this category. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we rated is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. Unfortunately, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.