Shell Lake Health Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given high grades in the category of long-term care as well. As a result, we gave it one of our strongest scores in that area with a area of A-. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 95.68346 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing grade features many datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Switching gears to the last category, this nursing home received an acceptable short-term care rating. Even though this wasn't nearly as dominant as many of its other category grades, this is still not the end of the world. Short-term care ratings are important for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below average.