Blue Valley Lutheran Homes

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home earned an excellent long-term care grade. We gave it an impressive grade of A in that area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home Nebraska in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

In the last category we rated, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home topped off a very favorable report card. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is considered to be a meaningful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.