The Laurels of Hendersonville

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned first-rate inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 98.29932 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. This facility was given a very positive short-term care score, with a B in the area. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The final category we assessed is nursing, in which this facility received a grade of C. Even though this ended up being its weakest category score, this is nevertheless not a poor grade. In determining our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did well in this subcategory. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident at least once a day.