Karlstad Senior Living

We also wanted to point out that this facility excelled in our nursing score. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Nursing scores are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility also received an A+ for its long-term care score. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Tallying another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't 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.

Moving on to the next category, this nursing home was given a highly favorable short-term care rating. In fact, we gave it an A- in this area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. In the area of short-term care, we strive to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.