Pembilier Nursing Center

Pembilier Nursing Center is a small non-profit facility in Walhalla, North Dakota. It looks like this nursing home is among the more impressive nursing homes we looked at. A grade in this range requires very strong marks across the board. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top third of all facilities in the nation. The best part of this facility's report card is is its long-term care rating. Long-term care grades are discussed in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.44 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

This facility also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the biggest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing score is based on many subcategories. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Switching gears to the final category, we awarded this facility a grade of D for short-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category score. However, we would not dwell on a single poor category. With our short-term care category, we seek to create a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 24.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.