LECOM Institute For Successful Aging

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. We were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. We would like to have more data for this nursing home. Without having access to information regarding deficiencies, it is a challenge to grade this nursing home in this category.

This facilities next most favorable area was short-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our short-term care scores are crucial for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing. This means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's third best category is its long-term care grade, where it was given a grade of C. Long-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 69.21296 percent of its patients. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last area we graded is nursing. It received a lowly F in this area, which is a poor grade. This is clearly a major disappointment. The nursing grade is based on a handful of subcategories, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had rock bottom scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in both of these data points. This is concerning when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this nursing home's fate of earning a very poor nursing score.