The Gardens

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also fared well in our long-term care category, where it received an impressive grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 88.16568 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be slightly below what we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. We assessed the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we looked at was short-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a C. This turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. This is still a middle of the pack score. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is frequently a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.