Harris Health Center

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more frequently.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our stronger scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. Our short-term care ratings are important for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. This includes a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This rounded out a very strong profile. Not many facilities received a B+ or higher in every category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.