The Laurels of Coldwater

While we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we gave it a B- for our nursing category. The nursing category assesses many factors, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

We were also stunned to find that this nursing home earned a solid short-term care rating in our assessment. We gave it a B- in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this also impacted quality of care. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Sadly, this facility only received a grade of D for its long-term care score, which is not a very good score. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 97.50623 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we assessed is inspections. This facility did not receive favorable inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F here. When a place has this poor of an inspection grade, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This particular nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed significant government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This often indicates that a bad track record has been an issue for several years.