Lexington Health Care Center

While we gave this place a terrible overall grade, we gave it a B+ for our inspections category. This was the result of the facility receiving a quality government inspection report this year. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We were also surprised to learn that this nursing home received a somewhat respectable short-term care grade in our assessment. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. With our short-term care assessment, we attempt to create a sound gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The key is determining what bearing this had on quality of care. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

This facility wound up receiving a a terrible grade in our long-term care category. It was given a lowly F in this area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.604744 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home really did not perform very well in this category either. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.