Mckenzie County Healthcare Systems - Good Shepherd Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. We assessed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place 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 frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of A for that category. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Moving on our third area, this nursing home received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to our fourth area, this facility received an extremely favorable short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more meaningful for folks requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.