Lakeland Hills Center

Lakeland Hills Center is a nursing home located in Lakeland, Florida, a city with a total of 237,282 people. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of D, which is a relatively poor rating. Fortunately, this nursing home is one of 11 nursing homes in this city so if you aren't impressed, you should have better options. The only positive thing we can say about this place is that it did not receive any F's in any of the categories we assessed. Additional information about these categories is available below.

While we were not very complementary of this facility's overall grade, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A. Inspection ratings are based on many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility was given its second most favorable category grade in the area of short-term care. We gave this facility a C in this area, which is a reasonably acceptable score. Short-term care ratings are crucial for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 41 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this is below average.

We were surprised to find that this facility also excelled in the category of nursing. We gave it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our best grades. The nursing rating weighs many factors. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. This nursing home also had abysmal marks in several of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hours. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this metric. This is quite concerning when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, which proved to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of D in the area of long-term care. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.12023 percent of its patients. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was not nearly as favorable. We found that this nursing home had 2.65 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an alarming rate.