Aurora Brule Nursing Home

With an address in White Lake, South Dakota, Aurora Brule Nursing Home is the sole nursing home located in the area. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the higher-rated facilities we looked at. A score of this caliber requires very strong scores across the board. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the United States. The best part of this facility's strong profile was its long-term care rating. We discuss long-term care in the next paragraph

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also performed well in long-term care, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.61 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing rating is largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.

Another impressive feature of this facility is its inspection rating. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our final area, this facility was given an acceptable short-term care grade. While this isn't quite as elite as several of its other scores, this is really not a bad grade. Our short-term care grades are crucial for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 33.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.