Lutheran Senior Services at Breeze Park

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for our short-term care rating. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is generally a fair measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home has earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our next category, this nursing home also performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a B+ in that category. This completed a first-rate profile. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.