Prairie Manor Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing score is primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this area. Our inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Places that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was superb in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Only a select group of facilities fared better in this area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we assessed is short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B+. This completed a very impressive profile. Few facilities earned a B+ or higher in all four categories. In our short-term care grade, we seek to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 4.5 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.