Dells Nursing and Rehab Center

Dells Nursing and Rehab Center is located in Dell Rapids, South Dakota. The city has 4,996 people. With an overall grade of B+, this facility should work for most people. Based on our assessment, you can do much worse than this place. This place's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this very important area. Inspection grades are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it received a very positive long-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.21 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing grades are tied to nurse staffing levels. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home received an acceptable short-term care rating. Even though this wasn't as strong as several of its other scores, this is really not a major area of concern. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is generally a meaningful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 24.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.