Augsburg Lutheran Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. In our short-term care rating, we attempt to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we rated is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 96.57143 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.