The Laurels of Galesburg

While this facility's overall score was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of short-term care. We gave it an A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

We also awarded this facility a grade of B- for our nursing rating. In calculating a facility's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat discouraging figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared well in this area. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients more often.

This nursing home earned mediocre government inspections in recent years. We gave them a C in this area. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home really did not perform well here either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the nursing home is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 88.686134 percent of its residents. This is quite a bit lower than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.