Garrison Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center

On top of being an elite facility overall, this nursing home performed well in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared as well in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not 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.

In addition, this nursing home was given quality marks in the area of long-term care. Consequently, it received one of our most impressive grades in that category with a grade of A+. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours 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. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients at least once a day.

The next area we rated is short-term care, which is this facility's worst category. We gave it an F for this category, which is clearly somewhat disappointing. Our short-term care ratings are probably most critical for patients requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. It appears that this place was subpar in many staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.