Towers Nursing Home

Towers Nursing Home is an average-sized nursing home located in Smithville, Texas. It looks like this facility is a subpar nursing home. A grade in this range indicates we found some red flags. If you are not satisfied with this facility's pedestrian overall grade, you may have to look in other cities as this is the only nursing home in Smithville. If you aren't deterred by this place's profile, feel free to continue reading to learn more about its category grades. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid nursing homes with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's better category scores was in the area of long-term care. This wound up being its second most respectable category. In that area, we gave this facility a C. In calculating our long-term care grades, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.0625 percent of its residents. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.27 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its nursing grade. The nursing score consists of quite a few components, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is well below average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.

The next area we rated was short-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor score. With our short-term care assessment, we try to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this nursing home offers substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 33.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.