Harris Health Care Center North

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent short-term care grade. We gave them an A- in this area. Our short-term care ratings are arguably more critical for residents needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Another one of this facility's quality category grades came in the area of long-term care. We gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B+. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 62.13592 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we anticipated. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our nursing category consists of several subcategories, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient more often.

Finally, we wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.