Grace Care Center at Northpointe

Grace Care Center at Northpointe is one of five available facilities in Tomball, Texas. With an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a very poor facility. While the city grade in Tomball which is also just a D, you still should be able to do better. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category is inspections, which is discussed in the next section.

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

We were also pleasantly surprised to discover that this nursing home earned a decent long-term care grade in our assessment. We awarded it a grade of C in that category. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. The last datapoint we assessed was its hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 4.49 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care score. This is not a very good score. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most important for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it offers fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 47.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these relatively poor statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

This facility's least impressive category is nursing, which is the last area we looked at. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this category. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This facility provides 4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is actually better than we expected. In determining our scores, we add more weight to hours performed by more highly skilled nurses such as registered nurses. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home had poor scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and we were very disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.