Lakeland Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this critical category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means 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. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, short-term care is its second highest category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility's third highest category is its long-term care grade, where it was given a B-. In our long-term care assessment, we weigh the quantity of services offered by a facility, along with a handful of qualitative measures. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 98.97436 percent of its patients. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, in which this facility received a grade of B-. Although this is its worst category score, this is still a middle of the pack score. There are a host of criteria within this area. Most of the subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This place averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.