The Ambassador Nebraska City

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top-shelf nursing home also performed remarkably in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes fared better in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning our next area, we gave this facility a grade of A for its short-term care score. This is a dominant rating. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is more often than not a solid assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. We weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home also performed admirably in the nursing category. We gave it an A in this area. This completed a straight A report card. We scrutinized the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.