Garfield County Health Center

Garfield County Health Center is a very-small government-owned nursing home in Jordan, Montana. We awarded this nursing home an A+ overall grade, ranking it in the top ten percent of all nursing homes in the nation. This is just about as good of a place as you're going to find. Headlining this place's remarkable profile is its nursing rating, which we will address in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When computing our nursing scores, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility boasts a really impressive 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly skilled levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we were able to find. In addition to providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in Montana in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these metrics as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. This facility also received an A+ long-term care grade, making it one of the few facilities to be given several A+ category scores. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of offering well above average levels of nurse staffing, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category, this facility also was given an excellent short-term care rating, with an A-. This rounded out a first-rate profile. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This score is generally a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. One of this nursing home's strengths is it provides more than seven hours of care per week from registered nurses to each resident. This is the gold standard for this area, as it's roughly 50% higher than the average place's level of registered nurse staffing. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility permanently.