Laurel Ridge Health Care Cente

Laurel Ridge Health Care Cente is a nursing home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which has 24,677 people. It looks like this is a very good nursing home. We gave this it an overall grade of B+, which is very good rating. This facility truly has plenty working in its favor. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection rating, which you can find in the next paragraph.

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes fared better in that area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This facility was awarded an impressive short-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. In our short-term care rating, we strive to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more than 50% more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the nation with 61.3 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

This facility also was awarded a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of considering the amount 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 far higher than the majority of nursing homes. This facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Although it had 2.09 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities since it had more complicated patients.

The next category we graded was nursing. We awarded this nursing home a decent score in that category, with a C. Even though this is not as high as some of its other grades, it is nevertheless nothing to be ashamed of. Nursing grades are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.