Lawrence Street Health Care Center

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an B. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's second least favorable score was long-term care, where it received just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other nursing homes offer. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 90.28571 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be several points below average. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care, turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a grade of D in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Considering its abysmal grade in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this nursing home offers far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.