Letcher Manor

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also received an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.63441 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another issue is the F this nursing home was given in the category of short-term care. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is generally a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.1 percent of its residents returning home.

The next area we scored was nursing, which ended up being this facility's weakest area. We gave it an F in this area, which is obviously very concerning. In calculating our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.