Benedictine Living Center of Garrison

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this place also earned first-rate health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in this area, with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in 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. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home received strong marks in the area of short-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our most favorable grades in that category with a score of A-. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is frequently a solid measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning residents more often.

Switching gears to our next category, this nursing home was given an acceptable long-term care rating. Although this was not quite as strong as many of its other grades, this is truly not a major area of concern. In forming these long-term care scores, we quantify the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 98.8764 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.