Life Care Center of Stonegate

On top of earning a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the category of short-term care. Short-term care grades are generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we assessed was long-term care, in which this facility received a B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this nursing home's weakest area. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's weakest score still outperforms most other facilities. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 81.81818 percent of its patients, which is a bit lower than we expected. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.