Laurel Baye Healthcare of Greenville

It should also be noted that this nursing home's inspection grade outpaced its overall grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ for its inspections rating, which is one of our better scores. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we had favorable view of this nursing home's recent inspections.

One of this facility's higher category grades came in the category of long-term care. This ended up being its second most respectable category. In that category, we gave this facility a B-. Long-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's volume of nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home received its next highest category grade in the area of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a C in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable score. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most meaningful for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we rated is nursing, which was this nursing home's worst area. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously a major concern. There are a variety of criteria included in this grade. Most of the factors reflect levels of nurse staffing. This particular place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This statistic is significantly below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this area. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that so many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This metric helped pull down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.