The Laurels of Coldwater

With an address in Coldwater, Michigan, The Laurels of Coldwater is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. This nursing home was given an overall score of F. Based on our assessment, you would be better off to steer clear of this facility. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category was nursing, which is discussed in the next section.

Although this facility's overall score was as bad as it gets, it didn't perform as badly in nursing. In fact, we gave it a B- for this category. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

This facility also didn't grade out too badly in the area of short-term care. In fact, we gave it a grade of B- in that area, which is among its more respectable scores. In crafting these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home'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 devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. This place performed respectably with 46 percent of its residents returning home.

Sadly, this facility only received a grade of D for its long-term care grade, which is not a very good score. Facilities that do not score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 81.81818 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home wasn't as bad as we expected at keeping its residents out of the hospital. While it had 1.83 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was not bad since it had more complicated patients.

Turning our final area of inspections, this facility received an F here. You should pay special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection grade. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.