Lutheran Nursing Home

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing category. We gave them an A+ in this area. We scrutinized the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this category. This facility provided 0.6 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient more often.

This exemplary nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes performed better in this area. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category, we gave this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. This finished off a first-rate profile. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 94.666664 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.