Dakota Alpha

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home averages 0.5 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 facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving residents even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was given a top-shelf grade of A in our short-term care area. In crafting our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The last area we graded proved to be this facility's worst area. However, even its worst category would actually be a highlight for most facilities. We awarded it an above average grade of B in long-term care. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.