Sonterra Health Center

Sonterra Health Center is located in the large metropolitan area of San Antonio, Texas. With an overall grade of B-, this looks like a solid nursing home. If you take a look at the other options in San Antonio, we hope you will find this facility to be a better option than most of the facilities in the city. This city simply does not have a great selection of nursing homes. We were also pleased to find that this facility received consistently decent grades in all of our categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. It actually fared better than most facilities in this area. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country with 60.9 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. The nursing grade assesses quite a few subcategories, however, the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides only 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients at least once a day.

Our last category is long-term care, in which we awarded this facility a C in that category. In the category of long-term care, we analyze the amount of care provided by a facility, as opposed to more healthcare-oriented services. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 99.26199 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.17 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.