Spiritrust Lutheran the Village at Sprenkle Drive

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also received an impressive short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a B+ in this area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care scores are critical for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our nursing grade includes several datapoints, however, the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's least impressive category was long-term care, which is the final category we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category. In spite of multiple solid scores in other categories, this score is nevertheless alarming so we felt obligated to make a note of it. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 98.730156 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.