St Johns Lutheran Home

With an address in Albert Lea, Minnesota, St Johns Lutheran Home is one of four facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of F, we consider this to be a very poor facility. Albert Lea received a city grade of B-, so there are other options in the city worth looking at. We would not blame you if you're ready to stop reading and find another facility. However, if you want to learn more about this facility's category grades, we will discuss nursing in the next paragraph.

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. The nursing grade is based on several datapoints, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 4.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is better than average. In determining our nursing ratings, we apply more weight to hours performed by more highly skilled nurses such as registered or licensed nurses. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these statistics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this subcategory.

Incredibly, we gave this nursing home a B- for its short-term care grade, which isn't a bad grade. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This proved to be more of a strength for this facility. In fact, we found that it outperformed the majority of nursing homes in the country with 53.1 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most nursing homes.

We were also surprised to find that this nursing home received a somewhat respectable long-term care score this year. We gave it a B- in that area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was not quite as favorable. We found that this facility had 2.62 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Turning our last category of inspections, this nursing home received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this grade more heavily than other categories. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection grade. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 9 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.