Windsor Gardens Care Center

Windsor Gardens Care Center is a facility located in East Orange, New Jersey, a city with a population of 64,267 people. With an overall rating of C, this appears to be a decent nursing home. This facility has some things working in its favor. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

The second most favorable category we gave this facility in any area came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's assistance with daily living rather than the highly skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 98.5 percent of its patients against pneumonia. The last statistic we looked at is the facility's hospitalization rate. Although it had 2.25 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was not too far off the national average.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This facility provides 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing scores also consider some quality-focused statistics. We like to look at the percentage of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care can reduce these issues.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, which ended up being a weak spot for this nursing home. We gave this facility a grade of D in the area of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 26 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.