Lovington Healthcare

This facility received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This facility received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received a favorable long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.5 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a decent grade of B-. In crafting our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. We were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we looked at is nursing, where this facility was given a grade of B-. While this ended up being its weakest category score, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. We weighed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, while this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric.