St Lukes Lutheran Care Center

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We weighed the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses worked with patients, in computing our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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 often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this area. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was given an impressive grade of A in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. 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 only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final area, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our short-term care score. This finished off a very impressive profile. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.