The Gardens of Cedar Rapids

This nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category, with an A- in this area. This really propped up its overall grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is typically a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it received an A+ nursing rating. This is as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's least impressive category is long-term care, which is the final area we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category. Despite several solid grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless concerning so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 94.23077 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.