Sunquest Healthcare Center

Sunquest Healthcare Center is a facility located in Huron, South Dakota, a city with a population of 14,534 people. With an overall rating of B+, this is a very good nursing home. This facility truly has plenty of good features. The best aspect of this facility's strong report card was its inspection score. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph

On top of being an elite facility overall, this nursing home performed well in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Very few facilities performed this well in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received an impressive long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this area. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.68944 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as good measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last category we graded was short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable grade in that category, with a B-. Although this wasn't on par with many of its other grades, it is still not a major area of concern. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. It performed decently in this area, with 45.8 percent of its residents returning home.