Lake Park

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our inspection ratings are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a favorable long-term care score. In fact, long-term care is its second highest category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. For patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 60 percent of its residents. This is a few points below what we anticipated. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing grades are primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

The last area we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a favorable short-term care score this year, with a grade of C. Even though this isn't nearly as dominant as a few of its other category grades, this remains an acceptable score in that category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is frequently a solid measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents 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 patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.