University Health Lakewood Medical Center

One of the main reasons this proved to be a strong facility is that it received a very impressive long-term care grade. This ended up being its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Even though we determined this nursing home has a favorable amount of nursing hours provided by nurses and other nursing staff, we found its vaccine statistics to be somewhat below average. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 89.51613 percent of its patients. This is a figure we would love to see this facility improve on. Fortunately, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.22 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

This facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its inspections. We gave it an A- for that area, which is one of our top scores. Our inspection grades are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. 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 category we looked at was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a C in this area. Short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers at least 50% more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most other facilities. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared better than most facilities in this area with 49.2 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Our final area is nursing, where we awarded this facility a C in this area. Our nursing grade includes a number of data points. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This place provides an impressive 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in two of the data points we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are usually good indicators of the quality of nursing care available.