Colonial Gardens Nursing Home

Even though we did not give this facility a good overall grade, we gave it a strong score in long-term care, where it received a B+. This is better than most facilities in this area. This helped an otherwise poor profile. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Unfortunately, this ended up being one of its better grades. We weighed the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this area. With a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these datapoints to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care rating. This is not an impressive grade. Short-term care grades are vital for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

This nursing home did not receive a favorable inspection rating. We gave it a just D in this category. Inspection grades relate to a nursing home's inspections. We weight poor inspection ratings heavily in our assessment. Since the inspections are compiled by independent government inspectors, we consider this data to be very reliable. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 10 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.