Lutheran Home

Lutheran Home is a large non-profit facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It looks like this nursing home is among the best nursing homes we found. A grade in this range requires excellent marks across the board. In fact, we ranked this facility as the eighth best facility in Milwaukee. Headlining this facility's exemplary report card is its short-term care rating, which we will address in the next section.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grade is generally used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Wisconsin in this area with 64.5 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Nursing ratings are mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 4.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this place was also above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor dings aren't something to panic about.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. This nursing home was given a very good nursing rating this year, with a B. While this isn't nearly as elite as many of its other category grades, this remains one of our better scores for this area. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the well above average volume of care provided by nurses and other staff at this nursing home, we also were happy with the nursing home's vaccination record. For example, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.81309 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Although it had 2.13 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was close to the national average since it had more complicated patients.