Lafayette Center, Genesis Healthcare

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this facility's better category grades came in the area of long-term care. This ended up being its second most respectable category. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. With our long-term care category, we focus on the amount of care provided by a nursing home, along with a handful of quality datapoints. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this nursing home vaccinated only 83.77193 percent of its patients for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we graded was short-term care, which ended up being a low point for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for short-term care. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is frequently a reliable measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Based on its score in this category, we were not stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.1 percent of its residents returning home.