The Laurels of Athens

Located in Athens, Ohio, The Laurels of Athens is one of only two facilities in this area. Sporting an overall rating of B+, this facility should work for most prospective residents. This place definitely has plenty going for it. This facility is better in some categories than others, but it did not have any bad scores in any of the four major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually perfect. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other accomplishments is its first-rate short-term care score. We awarded them one of our best grades in that area, with a grade of A. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. This place provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. This is what we like to find when assessing a facility in this category. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the nation with 64.7 percent of its patients returning home.

The third area we looked at is long-term care. This facility was given a very positive long-term care score, with a grade of B+ in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.35526 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. This facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.19 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home was awarded a respectable nursing rating. Although this is not quite as elite as some of its other scores, this is truly not a bad grade. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this area. According to CMS records, this facility averaged 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Keep in mind that when we calculate our nursing grades, we apply more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of training. Lastly, this facility was relatively weak in some of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.