Houston Heights Healthcare Centre

While we were not complementary of this facility's overall grade, it earned an impressive nursing score this year. We gave it a B in this area. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses spend with patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

This facility also was awarded a strong short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a B in that area, which is one of our better. In our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Sadly, this facility received a grade of just D in our inspection category. This is well below average grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility had 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed large government fines in recent years of over $50,000. This often indicates that inspectors became fed up after several years of bad government inspections.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. It received a lowly F for this category, which is a poor score. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We found that this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 90.60403 percent of its patients, which is a bit of a concern. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.