Lutheran Care Center

Lutheran Care Center is an average-sized non-profit nursing home located in Altamont, Illinois. We awarded this nursing home an A overall grade, ranking it in the top fifth of all nursing homes in the United States. Based on the data we reviewed, you can't go wrong with this facility. This nursing home also received consistently good ratings in all four of the major categories. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.570816 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. The last datapoint we looked at was its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this place had 2.38 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not 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 resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. In calculating our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients more frequently.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home also performed admirably in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for this category. This finalized a first-rate profile. Our short-term care scores are crucial for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 41.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.