Bethel Lutheran Home

We awarded this facility one of our better scores in the area of nursing, with an A. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. The nursing rating analyzes several subcategories, but the main one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also awarded this nursing home a strong score in long-term care. This facility received a B+ in this category, which turns out to be one of our more impressive scores. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.611115 percent of its residents, which is better than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category scores came in the category of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is typically a solid assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Moving on our final category of inspections, this nursing home received an F in this area. This score was detrimental to this facility's overall score. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection grade. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility also received a substantiated complaint in the last few years. There seem to be no shortage of reasons to pass on this facility.