Lutheran Senior Services at Breeze Park

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be most critical for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. The nursing grade features many factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 nation 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 resident more frequently.

The last area we assessed is long-term care. We gave this nursing home an acceptable grade in this area, with a C. Even though this wasn't on par with many of this facility's other scores, it is still not a terrible score. Our long-term care grade focuses on a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.