Lakeside Lutheran Home

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider 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 inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing score is primarily associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Additionally, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a grade of B. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is considered to be a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we scored is long-term care, where we awarded it a favorable grade of B. This facility really doesn't have any weak spots. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.25926 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.