The Gardens at Stevens

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it a grade of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded it a very strong short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of B- in this category. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses spend with patients as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The last area we scored is long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is obviously very concerning. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility vaccinated 99.13043 percent of its residents, which is a very solid figure. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.