University Health Lakewood Medical Center

One of the main reasons this proved to be a strong nursing home is that it earned a very impressive long-term care rating. In fact, this was its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 90.05935 percent of its residents, which is a few points less than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this facility received excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with an B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The third area we looked at was short-term care. This facility was given an impressive short-term care grade, with a B in the category. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most critical for individuals requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Our last category is nursing, in which we awarded this nursing home a B- in this category. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our score in this category. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.