Linn Health Care Center

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong assessment, this facility also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility was given a highly favorable nursing rating. Although this wasn't nearly as dominant as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the stronger scores we offer. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 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 facility 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 typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.