Litzenberg Memorial Merrick County Long-term Care

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. Inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this area, we awarded it an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility is also above average in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.58064 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home also received a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we looked at was nursing. We awarded this nursing home a decent grade in this area, with a B-. Even though this wasn't as strong as several of this facility's other grades, it is still not a bad grade. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in some quality-focused metrics. We especially like to look at the percent of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are decent measures of the quality of nursing care, since superior care can reduce these problems.