The Lutheran Home

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ inspection score. This grade is based on its recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the highest complements we can offer a facility. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Nursing scores are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient more often.

The third area we assessed is long-term care. Contributing to its elite profile, this facility also performed well in that area. In fact, we awarded it a of A for the area. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.455536 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. 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 an impressively low number.

In our last area, we awarded this facility a grade of A+ for our short-term care score. This topped off a very favorable report card. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who returned home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.