Gulf Health Care Center in Galveston

While we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a very impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our more favorable grades in that category with a B. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid facilities with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an C. When computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is not a very good score. Our short-term care ratings are arguably more critical for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final area we scored was long-term care, where this facility was given an abysmal score here as well. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is obviously very concerning. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated 70.25862 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.