St Lukes Sunrise Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In this area, we gave this facility an A. When determining our nursing grades, we analyze both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home North Dakota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a resident more frequently.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. This place received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care. This nursing home was awarded an above average short-term care score, with a grade of B+ in the area. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher scores in this area, with a B. While this isn't as favorable as several of this nursing home's other grades, it is still a perfectly acceptable score. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.