Jefferson Community Health & Life Gardenside

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. The nursing grade considers a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. 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 place 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 avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Moving on our third category, this facility was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A- in this category. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last area we graded ended up being this facility's weakest category. Nevertheless, even its lowest point would actually be a strength for most facilities. We awarded it a favorable grade of B in our long-term care category. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.