Garfield Heights

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially would like to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A in this area. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded 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 category, we awarded this facility an B+. The nursing rating includes quite a few factors, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more positive scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B+. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 89.1635 percent of its patients. This is slightly less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place 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 an impressively low figure.

The last area we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home received an above average short-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. While this was not quite as impressive as some of its other scores, this is still a decent rating in that category. Our short-term care scores are arguably more critical for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.