Bedford Gardens Care and Rehabilitation Center

Bedford Gardens Care and Rehabilitation Center is one of seven nursing homes located in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Featuring an overall score of C, this looks like a respectable nursing home. Based on our ratings, this place ought to meet the needs of many people. We were also pleased to find that this nursing home was consistent in all four of the major categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we were not able to find deficiency data for this facility. We wish we had more data for this nursing home. Without having access to all of the deficiency related data, it ended up being a challenge to assess it in this area.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 79.442505 percent of its patients. This is a few points less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. The last datapoint we looked at was its hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 4.2 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as favorable as most of its other scores in this category, this figure may be skewed for some nursing homes based on some of the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This facility was awarded its third most favorable category score in the category of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this area, which is an acceptable score. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. It fared respectably with 47.1 percent of its residents returning home.

The next area we scored is nursing. We gave this facility a grade of C in that category. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This facility provided just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we like to look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. These data points are decent measures of the quality of nursing care.