Lancaster Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

This nursing home excelled in the area of long-term care, where it earned a grade of A-. Few facilities fared better in this category. If not for this area, this facility's overall score would have likely been lower. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.6755 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Inspections is another area where this facility excelled. In fact, we gave this facility an B+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as 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 health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. There are numerous datapoints within this area. Most of these subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home really didn't fare very well. With a very poor grade of F in short-term care, this was this facility's weakest category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to 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. This figure was well off the national average.