Lawton Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In this category, we awarded this nursing home an A. When determining a facility's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses spend with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

This facility also received a fine short-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be this nursing home's second strongest category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is considered to be a fair assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We awarded this nursing home an A- for inspections. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The next category we looked at was long-term care, in which this facility received a B-. Although this proved to be its worst category score, this is nevertheless not the end of the world. In the area of long-term care, we weigh the amount of services provided by a facility, rather than more medically-intensive services. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Finally, this place excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.