Garnet Hill Rehabilitation and Skilled Care

One of the reasons this place is a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this area, we gave it an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This facility is also above average in the category of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility was given an impressive long-term care score as well. We gave it one of our better grades in that category with a grade of B. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.622894 percent of its patients, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we assessed is nursing, where this facility was given a grade of B-. This turned out to be this facility's weakest category. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.