Good Shepherd Lutheran Community

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A+ in this category. Inspection grades are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that area, which turns out to be one of our better scores. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.870056 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third category we graded was short-term care, where this facility's grade lagged a bit behind as some of its other scores. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D, which is well below average. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is considered to be a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. We found that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

Moving on to the last area, we gave this facility a D in nursing. This is the nursing home's least impressive category score. Unfortunately, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses commit to patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. With only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.