Laurel Lakes Rehabilitation and Wellness Center

We were not high on this facility's overall grades or its category scores. We gave it a grade of just D for long-term care and that turned out to be its best grade. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.425285 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Sadly, this facility's second best category was inspections, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. You should be especially cautious when considering a nursing home that has severe deficiencies on a recent inspection report. This particular facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed significant government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This typically suggests that a bad performance spanned more than one year.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care score. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is often a solid measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score of this caliber for this category, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing figures we focus on. In fact, it provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final item we considered in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.7 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

The final category we assessed was nursing, in which this nursing home was given an abysmal score in this category as well. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. Nursing scores are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.