Laurel Lake Retirement Community

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our long-term care category. We gave it an A for that category. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 92.47312 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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 typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we scored is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a favorable grade of B. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is frequently a fair assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.