St Marks Lutheran Home

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an A. Our short-term care grade is often used to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 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 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 earned a good score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We would argue that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of those deficiencies. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 97.36842 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.