Sanford Health & Rehabilitation

Even though this nursing home's overall grade was abysmal, it didn't perform terribly in short-term care. We awarded it a B- for that category, which is a decent score. However, this was not enough to salvage its profile. Short-term care grades are generally used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

Interestingly, this nursing home's abysmal overall score can't really be attributed to its government inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of C for inspections. We believe that one of the most critical factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. To our surprise, this facility had several category J through K deficiencies, which are some of the worst possible deficiencies. These two categories indicate that inspectors found deficiencies which placed patient health or safety in imminent danger. We hope this facility is able to prevent these kinds of issues in the future.

Another unfortunate development was the F this facility received in the category of long-term care. For patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility really didn't perform very well here either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is really as bad as it gets. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.