The Gardens of Bellaire

On top of earning a great overall score, this nursing home also received an A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are likely most meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to inspections, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's government inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a very strong long-term care score. This actually ended up being this facility's third best category score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we graded is nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a B+. This completed a very favorable report card. Few facilities received a B+ or better in in each area we assessed. Our nursing grade assesses several subcategories, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.