Carroll Lutheran Village

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. Our nursing grade analyzes many factors, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Contributing to its high-end resume, this facility also received a dominant short-term care grade, with a score of A. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is generally a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it excelled in inspections, with a grade of B in that category. It outperformed most nursing homes in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The next area we graded was this nursing home's worst category. However, even its weakest link would actually be a highlight for many facilities. We gave it a favorable grade of B in our long-term care category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.08676 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.