The Laurels of Chagrin Falls

Although this facility's overall score wasn't a highlight, it received a good grade for short-term care. In fact, we gave it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. This one of its few redeeming features. In forming our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Building on its strong profile, this facility also received an excellent nursing rating, with an B. Our nursing score analyzes many datapoints, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

We wanted to point out this nursing home's inspection score where it received an F. This often means we found some red flags on the inspections. For places with bad inspection scores, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we would like to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a nursing home's poor performance spanned multiple years.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home was given a rock bottom grade of F in that area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home did not perform well in our measures relating to patient care. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 78 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit below the national average. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.