Azalea Gardens Nursing Center

This nursing home's best category grade came in the category of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B. It actually outperformed many nursing homes in this category. Short-term care scores are important for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of B- for our inspections rating. This is a very respectable nursing score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we had positive view of this facility's recent inspections.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of B-. Our nursing score is based on a handful of subcategories, however, the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The next area we graded is long-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.57627 percent of its patients. This facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.