Linn Health Care Center

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an A. Short-term care scores are crucial for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. 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, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its inspection reports. We gave it a grade of A- for that area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also was given an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 98.48485 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping 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.

The last area we rated was nursing. We gave this facility one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of B. This facility ended up being strong in each category we looked at. When calculating our nursing scores, we assess both staffing levels and the training levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This nursing home was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.