Garden Terrace at Overland Park

On top of having a decent overall grade, we also want to point out that this nursing home earned favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. This is a much better score than the nursing home's overall score. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. Based on this, we still had favorable view of this facility's recent inspections.

This nursing home also excelled in nursing, where it earned an B. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both staffing levels and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's third best category was short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a C. Our short-term care ratings are important for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. The facility supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility was given a decent long-term care grade of C. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for those requiring more traditional services associated with personal care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 85.39823 percent of its residents. This is many points lower than what we were hoping for. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.