Oaklawn Estates

To go along with its decent overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our nursing rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It received one of our highest scores in that area with an B+. Inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is really what you want to see in this important metric.

This nursing home also was given an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a B in this area, which is one of our better. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we rated was short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in short-term care, making this the facility's worst category. Our short-term care grades are critical for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It appears that this facility was below average in many staffing areas we focus on. The facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 2.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.