Lutheran Retirement Home

To pair with a strong overall grade, we awarded this place an A+ for our inspection category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat 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 strong in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B+. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.74436 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category, this facility also was awarded a first-rate nursing rating, with a B+. This wrapped up a very strong report card. When computing a facility's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.