Garden Court Health and Rehabilitation Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home also received a favorable short-term care score. In fact, we awarded them a B+ in that category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. In calculating these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing score. Nursing scores are primarily tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we rated is long-term care. We awarded this facility a D in our long-term care category, rendering this the facility's weakest category. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information on vaccination rates. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.