Garden View Care Center at Dougherty Ferry

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. After we finished assessing the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We assessed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. Contributing to its strong profile, this nursing home also excelled in this category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A for the category. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. This wrapped up a straight A report card for this place. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.