The Gardens at Blue Ridge

With an address in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, The Gardens at Blue Ridge is one of five available facilities in the city. This facility was given a rock bottom overall grade based on the data we assessed. Unfortunately, the city grade for Harrisburg isn't too much better. Nevertheless, you still should be able to do better More information on this facility's category grades may be found below. Its best category is inspections, which is addressed in the next section.

Sadly, we didn't have any good things to say about this nursing home's overall grade or its other ratings. Its best category was the category of inspections. Nevertheless, with just a D in this area, it still performed relatively badly. One of the more important factors in evaluating inspection reports is deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility was assessed 10 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also want to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This usually suggests that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for several years.

This facility's second best category is short-term care, but it nevertheless received a grade of just D in that category. This ended up being a relatively poor grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is frequently a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Given its weak grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home provided significantly fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 38.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. This statistic was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

We were surprised to find that this facility also excelled in the category of nursing. In fact, we gave it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our highest grades. Our nursing rating analyzes many components, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.

The last area we scored was long-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this area, which is an abysmal grade. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 95.96273 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 2.3 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure is far less impressive than its vaccination record.