Lake Pointe Health Care

Although we didn't grade this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have too many deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the skill levels of those nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care rating. This is well below average in this category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home gave the vaccine to just 87.62542 percent of its residents, which is somewhat concerning. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care, in which this facility was given a bottom of the barrel grade in this category as well. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. Our short-term care grades are likely more meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this facility provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.