Lawrence Co Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of achievements, it also was given a first-rate long-term care score. We awarded them an impressive strong of A- in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B. Our short-term care ratings are vital for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we graded proved to be this nursing home's poorest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for our nursing category. In computing our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.