St Luke Lutheran Nursing Home

In addition to earning a strong overall grade, this facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its recent inspection reports. We gave it an A for this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. We weighed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also was given a very impressive short-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being this nursing home's third most impressive category score. In that area, this facility received a score of A. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The final category we rated is long-term care. In this area, we awarded this facility a strong grade of B. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 86.51163 percent of its residents. This is a bit below what we anticipated. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.