West Lawrence Care Center

Although this facility's overall grade was horrible, it surprisingly fared well in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is a solid grade. This is one of the only favorable things we can tell you about this place. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.19868 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Interestingly, this facility's terrible overall grade can't really be attributed to its government inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of C for our inspections rating. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. This facility had 2 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This indicates this facility avoided the more ominous categories of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

In addition, we gave this nursing home an F in the category of short-term care. Short-term care ratings are crucial for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The last area we scored is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a very poor score. There are a number of factors within this area. Most of the subcategories are tied to staffing levels. This place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were very disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.