Carroll Lutheran Village

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled at short-term care, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that category with an B+. Few nursing homes with an overall score in this range performed as well in multiple categories. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple relatively minor dings aren't the end of the world.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. We assessed the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in computing our score in this area. 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 typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

The next category we analyzed turned out to be this nursing home's poorest category. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for our long-term care category. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 99.507385 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.