Garden Gate Health Care Facility

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Inspection scores are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home was awarded a favorable short-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our better grades in that category with a score of B+. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This place provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the nation in this area with 59.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Turning to our third area, this nursing home also earned a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.92 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we graded was nursing, which is this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in this category. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. We do not think quantity of care was the reason for this facility's poor nursing score. With 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home actually surpassed the national average. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator of how carefully a nursing home's nursing staff is tending to its residents. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.