Mason Creek Transitional Care of Katy

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A+. This is a much better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded it a first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility was given its third most favorable category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this category, which is a respectable grade. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most meaningful for patients needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this place. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The last area we scored is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a poor grade. This is obviously a major concern. We looked at the skill-level of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is well below average. On top of its below average nursing hours, this nursing home also received poor marks in some of the quality-based metrics we considered in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this place's residents sustained falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this facility receiving a poor nursing rating.