Lewis County General Hospital-Nursing Home Unit

To pair with its decent overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for its inspection grade. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a positive score in long-term care. This facility earned a grade of B+ in this area, which turns out to be one of our more favorable grades. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 68.83408 percent of its patients. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing grade considers a number of factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we rated is short-term care. We gave this nursing home a D in short-term care, rendering this its weakest grade. Our short-term care scores are critical for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.