Northgate Health and Rehabilitation Center

Northgate Health and Rehabilitation Center looks like it is one of 64 nursing homes located in San Antonio, Texas. This city has more nursing homes compared to most other cities in the country. This nursing home received an overall rating of F. Keep in mind that San Antonio received a city grade of C, so should look at other options in the city as well. If you aren't deterred by this nursing home's profile, feel free to continue reading to find out about its category scores. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

Although we gave this place a terrible overall score, we awarded it a B for our inspections rating. This is due to the facility receiving a quality inspection report this year. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have a long list of deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Remarkably, we gave this facility a B- for its short-term care rating, which is not a bad grade. Our short-term care grade is generally used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility and discovered this was this facility's strongest datapoint within this area. This place fared well in this area with 62.5 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this metric.

We were surprised to find that this nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our best scores. The nursing score assesses a handful of components, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really pulled down this facility's nursing grade significantly.

The final category we looked at was long-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. For residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.