Avera Creighton Care Centre

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this facility excelled in inspections, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A in this category. Inspection ratings are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor dings are not something to panic about.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing score is primarily tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Nebraska in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident more often.

This facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Very few facilities received a better grade in this area. Short-term care grades are critical for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the final area, this nursing home was given a highly favorable long-term care grade. While this isn't as dominant as several of its other category grades, this is still one of the better scores we offer. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.