Wellbrooke of South Bend

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our nursing score considers a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Indiana 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 employing a protocol of turning a resident more often.

Moving on to the final category, this nursing home was given a respectable long-term care grade. Even though this wasn't quite as elite as several of its other grades, this is truly not the end of the world. Our long-term care grade is used to measure a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.