Bethel Lutheran Home

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. There are many factors within this grade. Many of the datapoints reflect levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 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 facility 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration 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 important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on our next category, this nursing home was given a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in this area. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home also excelled in the long-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A- in this category. This rounded out a straight A profile. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.507385 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.