Prairie Lakes Health Campus

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is typically a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless inspections recently. We awarded them an A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our last category, this facility really didn't fare well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area, this is notably its weakest area. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 96.20253 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.