Lutheran Community at Telford

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility has received near flawless health inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing score is based on several subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 4.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this facility also excelled in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. With less than 5 percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers could be prevented by offering better nursing care and having a policy of moving residents more frequently.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Very few nursing homes received a better grade in this category. Our short-term care ratings are vital for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. This facility offers more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. It outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation in this area with 59.9 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to our last area, this facility also performed admirably in the long-term care category. We awarded it an A- for that area. This rounded out a straight A report card. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. This nursing home's vaccination records weren't as strong as its number of nursing hours per resident. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 83.009705 percent of its residents. We would like to see some improvement herein this statistic in the future. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.68 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.