University Health Lakewood Medical Center

While we gave this place a bad overall rating, we awarded it a somewhat respectable grade in the category of inspections, where we gave it a B-. This was certainly better than its other category grades. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. In addition to having severe deficiencies, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of B- in the area. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident more frequently.

The next area we looked at was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

Our last area is long-term care, in which we gave this nursing home a grade of B- in that category. In calculating our long-term care scores, we assess the personal care offered to a nursing home's patients. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home gave the vaccine to only 87.462685 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.