Norwegian Christian Home and Health Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.4898 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this facility received impressive short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of B. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility 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. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's least impressive category was nursing, which is the final category we scored. In this area, we gave this nursing home a D. When computing our nursing scores, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is an alarmingly low total. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this nursing home's nursing score substantially.