Oglala Sioux Lakota Nursing Home

In addition to receiving an elite overall grade, this facility also received an A+ inspection score. This grade is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Nursing grades are largely associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also want to note the fact that this facility received a first-rate grade of A in our long-term care category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 90.38461 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we were hoping for. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we rated, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility rounded out a straight A profile. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.