Life Care Center of Coeur D'alene

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it earned a strong short-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Short-term care grades are generally employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

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. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning residents more frequently.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

The next area we graded was long-term care. We gave this facility a solid grade in this category, with a grade of B-. Even though this wasn't as high as several of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a terrible score. In computing our long-term care grades, we analyze the assistance with daily living offered to a nursing home's residents. After considering the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 99.545456 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.