Lakeside Lutheran Home

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better 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.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this 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 long-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we graded is short-term care. In this category, we gave this facility a favorable grade of B. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most important for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. 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 nursing home's residents returned home.