The Laurels of Middletown

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall grade, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid facilities that have too many deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the road score in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 76.01156 percent of its patients. This is several points below the national average. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Our next area we graded was short-term care, in which this nursing home received an F. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Given its score in this category, we were not surprised to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we assessed. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last area we analyzed is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. Our nursing score is based on a variety of data points. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This place averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic dragged down this facility's nursing rating significantly.