Lea Hill Rehabilitation and Care Center

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A-. When calculating our nursing ratings, we look at both staffing levels and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents at least once a day.

Additionally, we also wanted to note that this facility was given positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher scores in this category, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest score. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing. This includes a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Sadly, this nursing home's next best score is long-term care. However, with a D in this category, it still fared somewhat poorly. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning our final category of inspections, this facility received an F here. This score was detrimental to this facility's overall score. When a place has this bad of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This particular facility was assessed 4 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also want to point out that this facility received significant government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This generally means that a facility's bad track record spanned several years.