Cascades at Orchard Park

Cascades at Orchard Park is a facility located in Orem, Utah, which has a population of 88,528 people. Featuring an overall rating of B+, this facility should work for most prospective patients. Remarkably, the facilities in Orem received high grades across the board, making this one of the best places in Utah to find a nursing home. This nursing home is stronger in some categories than others, but it didn't have any bad scores in any of the major areas discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home really excelled at short-term care, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Utah in this area with 67.7 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given a favorable long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 97.58064 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't take any chances. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Although it had 2.68 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than most facilities due to it having more complex patients.

The next area we graded is this nursing home's worst area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for our nursing category. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.