Carrie Elligson Gietner Home

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B+. It actually fared better than most facilities in this area. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.61832 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Lastly, although this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this area.

The last area we analyzed is short-term care, which turned out to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D for our short-term care category. Our short-term care grade is generally used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average nursing home. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.