Solheim Lutheran Home

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its best category. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed at a high level in the area of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that area with an A-. Our inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Turning to our next category, this facility also earned a grade of B for its short-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that it performed better than most facilities in this area with 54.1 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

The final area we scored is long-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This actually ended up being this facility's worst area. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.548386 percent of its patients. This is a few points below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.