Laurel Court

Even though we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it earned a more respectable long-term care rating this year. We gave it a B- in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we were able to find for this place. With our long-term care rating, we weigh the sheer volume of care offered by a nursing home, as well as a series of quality measures. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. This nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care score and that actually turned out to be its second most favorable score. Our short-term care grade is often used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. With a score this poor in this category, we were not surprised to discover this nursing home was well below average in several staffing metrics we focus on. The nursing home supplied far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.

Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We gave it a grade of just D for our inspections rating. One of the more critical factors in assessing inspection reports is deficiencies. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by CMS had potential to cause actual harm to patients. Another area of concern is that CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

Moving on to the fourth area, this facility really did not perform very well in this category either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is just about as terrible as it gets. When computing a facility's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the skill levels of the nurses. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.