Hermann Hospital

Hermann Hospital is located in Houston, Texas, which appears to have more than 20 nursing homes. Sporting an overall score of A+, this nursing home outpaced many of the facilities in Houston by a significant margin. Based on our assessment, this place is simply as good as it gets. One of the best aspects of this facility's stellar report card is its inspection rating. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses to its residents than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the nation in this area with 72 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

An additional strength for this facility is long-term care, where it was given an A+ grade. This is just about as elite as it gets in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the final category we scored, this facility was awarded a very strong grade of A in our nursing category. With this score, the facility completed a straight A report card. We weighed the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provided 8.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This was one of the more impressive figures we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home in Texas in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these metrics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care offered.