Lighthouse Nursing Care Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to note the fact that this facility was given a superb score of A in our long-term care category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 95.3125 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility also performed admirably in the nursing category. We gave it an A- in this area. This completed a straight A profile. The nursing rating is based on several data points, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.