Garden Terrace Alzheimer's Center of Excellence

Garden Terrace Alzheimer's Center of Excellence is an average-sized nursing home located in Fort Worth, Texas. We gave this facility a very respectable overall grade of A. As a matter of fact, we ranked it as the fifth best facility in Fort Worth. Even in a city featuring 37 nursing homes, this facility really stands out as a great selection. If you scroll down, you will see this place's category scores, which look to be just as strong as its overall score.

On top of faring well overall, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an impressive grade of A in that category. In our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a fair measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage 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 Texas in this area with 61.6 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that 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.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. In computing a facility's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses commit to residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. With 4.6 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this facility surpassed the vast majority of facilities. Finally, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided.

Moving on to the fourth area, this facility also performed admirably in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category. This completed truly elite report card. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 91.056915 percent of its patients. This is somewhat below what we expected but still a decent percentage. This place was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 1.32 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.