The Heights of Alamo

We want to draw your attention to the fact 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, it received one of our best grades in this area with a grade of A+. Inspection ratings are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it a B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our better. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received its next most favorable category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this facility a B- in this area, which is a respectable grade. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The last category we assessed was nursing, which ended up being this facility's least impressive category. It received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.