Shady Lawn Nursing Home

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor dings aren't something to panic about.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility was given favorable long-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second best score. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 92.888885 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of B- in this category. There are several datapoints included in this grade. Most of these subcategories are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, while this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of our quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this area.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home received a decent short-term care score of C. Short-term care grades are often used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. It doesn't look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 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.