The Laurels of Norworth

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B for that area, which is one of our better scores. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Remarkably, we awarded this facility a grade of C for our short-term care rating, which is not a bad grade. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a solid assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.

The third category we graded is long-term care, in which this nursing home was given an F. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.73822 percent of its residents, which is higher than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home did not perform well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. There are several subcategories included in this grade. Most of these criteria reflect nurse staffing. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This statistic is well below average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.