Good Shepherd Lutheran Home

With an address in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, Good Shepherd Lutheran Home is the lone option located there. With an A overall grade, we ranked this facility in the top 20 percent of all facilities in the country. Based on the data we reviewed, you can't go wrong with this place. This place also received very consistent scores in all four of our categories. Additional information about its category grades is available below.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. There are a host of datapoints included in this area. Most of the datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided 4.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This was one of the higher totals we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. Both of these statistics are impressive. In addition to offering impressive levels of care, this facility also fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. This place fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 53.1 percent of its residents returning home.

Racking up another strong category grade, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an A-. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

In the last category we graded, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this score, the facility rounded out an elite profile. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to offering well above average levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 99.439255 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. While it had 1.77 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was better than the majority of nursing homes since it had more complex patients.