The River Gardens Rehab and Care Center

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home earned nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, 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. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Arizona in this area with 64 percent of its residents returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B+. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We weren't able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we rated was nursing, ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. This was one of the couple of weak links in a strong profile. Our nursing grade is mostly tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these data points to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.