Garfield Heights

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent inspections. We awarded it a grade of A for this category, which is one of our best grades. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

This nursing home also received an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 88.809944 percent of its residents. This is slightly lower than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home received a decent short-term care rating. Even though this isn't quite as strong as several of its other scores, this is truly not a terrible score. Our short-term care grades are arguably more meaningful for those requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.