Life Care Center of Sandpoint

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a very impressive short-term care score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Our short-term care scores are vital for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing grades are largely associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient more frequently.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. Adding to its top-shelf resume, this facility also performed well in that category. In fact, it received a of A- for that category. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.23529 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Lastly, this facility also earned top notch inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.