Windward Gardens

With an address in Camden, Maine, Windward Gardens is one of a mere two available nursing homes in this city. With an A- overall grade, we ranked this nursing home in the top quarter of all nursing homes in the nation. Based on our analysis, you can not go wrong here. This nursing home also received consistently good grades in all of the major categories we assessed. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility earned an impressive grade of A in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 77 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was given a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 92.85714 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 3 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this admittedly wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this category, this figure may be skewed for some facilities based on the medical complexity of residents.

In the final category we graded, this facility was given a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility wrapped up a first-rate report card. In determining our nursing grades, we weigh both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This facility provides an incredible 4.7 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is far more care than what is provided by most facilities. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.