Lorien Health Systems Mt Airy

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned a grade of A. Short-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Contributing to its fine profile, this nursing home also received a dominant long-term care score, with a score of A-. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 91.935486 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is slightly less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another quality feature of this facility is its inspection rating. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A-. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home also performed well in the nursing category. We awarded it an A- for that category. This wrapped up truly elite profile. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.