The Laurels of Gahanna

Although we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable short-term care score this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we could find for this nursing home. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

Interestingly, this facility's abysmal overall grade can't really be attributed to its inspection reports. We gave it a C for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This facility had 5 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but none were in any of the categories labeled J through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to place patient safety or health in immediate harm or jeopardy. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. The nursing grade is based on quite a few subcategories, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. With only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we scored is long-term care, in which this nursing home received an abysmal grade in this category as well. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category may not provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 81.072556 percent of its residents. This is several points lower than average. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.