Jenkins Living Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is typically a solid measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Contributing to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also was given a dominant long-term care score, with a score of A. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place South Dakota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident at least once a day.

This facility has earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. This is one of the few places in the nation to receive an A- or better in every category. Our inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.