Avera Morningside Heights Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing grades are largely based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning residents more often.

Turning to another of this facility's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. We gave this facility a decent grade in this category, with a grade of B-. While this is not as favorable as several of its other scores, it is still not the end of the world. Long-term care ratings are based on a facility's volume of nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.5984 percent of its residents, which is more than most nursing homes. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.