Lewis County Nursing Home District

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this nursing home received strong long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second best grade. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.45652 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents more often.

The next area we graded was short-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. In calculating these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. It appears that this facility was below average in many staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.