Lorien Taneytown

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an excellent short-term care score, with a grade of A. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was elite in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Very few nursing homes received a better grade in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we rated was nursing. We gave this facility a solid score in that area, with a grade of B-. Although this isn't as favorable as several of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. The nursing rating considers numerous subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also baked a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This nursing home was subpar in two of the major metrics we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally decent measures of the quality of nursing care offered.