Benedictine Living Center of Garrison

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes fared better in that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also was awarded a first-rate short-term care grade. We awarded them a strong strong of A in this area. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. When determining a facility's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home's worst category is long-term care, which is the final area we looked at. For this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. We wanted to draw your attention to this potential weak link, however, you should not dwell on one bad category either. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 97.790054 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.