St Luke Lutheran Community-Portage Lakes

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing grade includes several factors. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we gave this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable short-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The final area we scored is long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a B-. This actually proved to be this nursing home's weakest area. This is still nothing to be ashamed of. In calculating these long-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's personal care services. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 98.05825 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.