Laurelwood Healthcare Center

Laurelwood Healthcare Center is a small facility located in Jackson, Tennessee. With an overall score of B, this facility is a quality option. This should be on your short list in Jackson as we rated it as one of the three best nursing homes in the city. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection rating, which you can find in the next section.

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this place excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Not many facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home performed well in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A for that area, which is one of our most impressive scores. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this nursing home had 3.1 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the medical complexity of patients.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this subcategory. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning patients even once per day.

The last area we graded was short-term care. Sadly, it received an F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. You should not simply dismiss a nursing home because of one poor category though. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 24.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.