Lawrence County Manor

This nursing home's overall grade was propped up by a strong long-term care rating. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that category, with a grade of B. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 97.484276 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

It should also be noted that this nursing home's inspection score was strong as well. We gave it a grade of B for inspections, which is one of our better scores. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The next area we looked at was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this area. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. It offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.