The Gardens at East Mountain

The Gardens at East Mountain is one of eight facilities located in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Featuring an overall score of C, we deemed this facility to be ranked among the top three facilities in the city. An overall grade in this range is usually a reliable indicator of a middle of the road facility. Based on our analysis, this nursing home likely wouldn't be a bad choice. One of the highlights of this nursing home's report card is its strong inspection grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in this area with a grade of A-. Our inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Building on this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of B- in this area. Nursing ratings are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provides 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, while this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric.

This facility's next highest category was short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of C. Our short-term care grades are likely most meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 38.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.

Turning to the last category, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable long-term care grade of C. With our long-term care grade, we assess the sheer quantity of services offered by a nursing home, as well as a series of qualitative data points. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 98.655914 percent of its residents, which is an above average figure. The last datapoint we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 1.95 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is not too far off the national average.