Silver Tree Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in this area with an A. Our inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong grade in our nursing category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing grade is primarily associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

We also gave this nursing home a favorable grade in long-term care. This facility received a B in this category, which is one of our more impressive scores. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. We gave this facility a grade of D in this category. This really is one of the couple of dings on a quality profile. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is more often than not a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. It looks like this facility was below average in several staffing metrics we focus on. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.