Lakeside Health Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 98.2659 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Places that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing grade consists of quite a few components, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we graded was short-term care, where this facility was given an A-. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or better in in each area we assessed. In crafting these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.