Life Care Center of Gwinnett

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades came in the category of short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B+. It actually outperformed most facilities in this category. With our short-term care grade, we try to create a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Georgia in this area with 63.9 percent of its residents returning home.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. We gave this nursing home an impressive grade of D. There are a host of factors included in this category. Many of the datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged a meager 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This number is well below average. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.

The next area we graded was long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this nursing home a D in this category. Unfortunately, this grade hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.16514 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable datapoint. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 1 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.