Galena Stauss Nursing Home

This nursing home fared well in long-term care, with an impressive grade of A- in this area. This really helped its overall score quite a bit. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.48485 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider 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 always a good sign.

This facility ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this category. In the area of short-term care, we strive to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home did not perform very well. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is this nursing home's weakest category. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.