LaVerna Senior Living

Even though we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a better long-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we can find for this place. In the category of long-term care, we focus more on the quantity of care offered by a facility, rather than more sophisticated services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinates 99.53052 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility's second best category was the area of inspections. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed poorly. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, we want to point out that this facility was assessed significant government fines in recent years exceeding $50,000. This often indicates that CMS inspectors became frustrated after several years of failed inspections.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we looked at was short-term care, which is this facility's worst area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.