Lea Hill Rehabilitation and Care Center

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing score. We awarded them an A+ in this area. There are a number of datapoints within this area. Most of these datapoints reflect levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Contributing to this facility's list of accomplishments, it also was awarded a superb short-term care grade. We awarded them a dominant strong of A- in this category. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more meaningful for those needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The third area we looked at was long-term care. This facility was given a very positive long-term care grade, with a grade of B in the area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to the final category of inspections, this was not one of this facility's better grades. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent government inspection reports. We gave this nursing home a score of C in this category. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category G through L deficiencies. This means that this facility avoided the more ominous classes of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.