Sanford Care Center Vermillion

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also earned an A+ inspection rating. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. We weren't able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without the deficiency data for this facility, it was challenging to assess the place in the area of inspections.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A-. When computing our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident more often.

The third category we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home received a very positive short-term care score, with a B+ in the category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is typically a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this nursing home's worst area. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's lowest grade still rates higher than most other facilities. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.