Lawson Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades are based on many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A- for our short-term care score. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. There are a host of datapoints within this grade. Most of these datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we looked at is long-term care, proved to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. This was one of just a few weak links on an otherwise impressive report card. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. We were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to only 33.10811 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.