The Grove at Latrobe

While we gave this facility a terrible overall score, we gave it a B- for short-term care. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We were also surprised to find that this facility received a decent nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. In computing our nursing ratings, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this nursing home's inspection score where it received an F. This typically means we found some red flags on the inspection reports. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This facility was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by CMS had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received large government fines of over $50,000. This often suggests that government inspectors became frustrated after several years of bad health inspections.

Switching gears to the final area, this nursing home really did not fare well in this category either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 71.07692 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit less than the national average. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.