The Laurels of Fulton

On top of a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned a favorable long-term care grade this year. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that category, with a B+. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.52778 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this nursing home also was awarded favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a score of B+. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a fair assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final category we looked at, we found that this nursing home earned a solid government inspection report this year as well. It earned a decent score in our inspection category with a B. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.