Meridian Care of San Antonio

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it fared pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid nursing homes with a list of deficiencies flagged. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Despite this deficiency, this place still received a relatively favorable inspection report.

We were also stunned to learn that this nursing home received a somewhat respectable long-term care score in our assessment. We awarded it a C in this category. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 94.98208 percent of its residents. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third area we assessed is short-term care. This facility's received a poor short-term care score where it was given a lowly F. Our short-term care ratings are presumably most important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this place was well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on to the next area, this facility really didn't perform well in this category either. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. When calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. With just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. This facility also had abysmal scores in several of the quality-based measures to pair with its low nursing hours. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite concerning when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a weak nursing grade.