Garden Care Center

With an address in Franklin Square, New York, Garden Care Center is the lone option we identified in this area. We gave this facility an overall grade of B-. A score in this range requires some solid scores. Based on our analysis, there are certainly much worse nursing homes out there. The best part of this nursing home's profile was its stellar inspection grade. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this facility's overall grade was decent, 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 best scores. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem 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.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a grade of B in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive scores. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.16701 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. While it had 1.73 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was better than the majority of nursing homes since it had some more complex patients.

This nursing home's third best area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this area. Short-term care ratings are crucial for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more than 50% more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. It performed respectably in this metric with 45.9 percent of its patients returning home.

Moving on to the final area, this facility didn't fare well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is this facility's worst category. When determining a facility's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses are with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is below the national average. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really dragged down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.