Columbia Lutheran Home

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This turned out to be its best category. In this area, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home was given an elite grade of A- in our short-term care area. In the category of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home was given a strong long-term care score. We gave it an A- in this area, giving this facility straight A's. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.