Sanford Health & Rehabilitation

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a C for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. To our surprise, this facility had several category J and K deficiencies, which are among the worst categories of deficiencies. These two categories tell you that CMS uncovered deficiencies which placed resident safety or health in immediate jeopardy. Hopefully this facility is able to avoid these types of issues going forward.

Incredibly, we awarded this facility a C for its short-term care grade, which is not a bad grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in this area. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The final category we looked at is nursing. This facility was given an abysmal grade of F in this area. Our nursing score analyzes many subcategories, most of which are associated with nursing hours. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below average. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were very disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this area. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing score significantly.