Lawrence Nursing Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our long-term care rating and that actually ended up being its next best category. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 93.81154 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

This facility ended up receiving rock bottom score in our nursing category. It received an F in this category. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This place offered a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we assessed is short-term care, in which this facility was given a rock bottom score in this category also. It received an F in this category, which is obviously a major concern. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is generally a reliable assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score in this range in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this place was well below average in several staffing areas we assess. It offered far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.