Laurelbrook Nursing Home

This place's long-term care grade was better than its overall grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of B for its long-term care grade. For patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 91.25 percent of its patients. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B. We weighed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in computing our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Next we looked at this nursing home's inspection rating This score is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. We gave it a C in this category. This is a middle of the road score in this category. Our inspection scores are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. 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. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. For this category, we gave this facility a C. In forming these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. 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 a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.