Avera Morningside Heights Care Center

Who's actually on the floor

Staffing is the thing most closely tied to day-to-day quality of care, and it's the number families most often never see. This is registered nurses only — a smaller figure than the all-staff total above, because it counts the most highly qualified staff on their own — per resident, per day, comparing an average weekday against an average weekend.

Registered nurse coverage drops about 38% at weekends.

Staff turnover: 24%

High turnover matters because continuity does — a nurse who knows your mother notices when something is different about her. Someone on their second shift doesn't have that baseline.

What inspectors found

State inspectors visit at least once a year and after complaints. Over the last three years this facility received 17 citations. Raw counts mislead, though — a paperwork slip and a resident being harmed both count as one. Here they are by how serious inspectors judged them.

2 of these came from someone filing a complaint rather than a routine visit — worth weighing differently, because it means a person picked up the phone. All findings are recorded as corrected.

Medicare has issued $17,345 in fines here over the past three years.

What happened to residents

Everything above this point describes how the facility is run — who is on shift, what inspectors found. These are outcomes: what Medicare recorded happening to the people actually living there, averaged over a year and set against the state.

Medicare adjusts these figures for how unwell residents were on arrival, so a home that takes on frailer people is not marked down for it. That adjustment is imperfect where a facility's residents are unusual, which is why the state figure sits beside each number instead of a rank or a score.

Where too few residents met the criteria for a measure to be published reliably, Medicare withholds it and it shows here as not reported.

Disclosed affiliations

Medicare requires every facility to disclose the people and companies connected to it. Most names below are not owners — they are officers, directors, managers, trustees, and what Medicare calls “additional disclosable parties.” The role beside each name is the one Medicare recorded. This is worth reading because operators tend to run their facilities alike: where the same group stands behind a dozen homes, the record across all twelve tells you more than any single inspection does.

Of the 15 parties disclosed here, 1 holds an ownership interest; the rest are recorded in a management, officer, financial, or other disclosable capacity. A percentage is shown only where Medicare published one — for most disclosed parties it publishes none.

Other options nearby

Most families are choosing between whatever is close enough to visit often — and visiting often is itself one of the better protections a resident has. These are the closest 8 facilities.

Weekend column shows the change in registered-nurse coverage at weekends compared with weekdays.

Worth asking on a visit

Records only tell you so much. These are the questions this facility's particular numbers suggest you ask — go on a weekend if you possibly can.

1. Can I visit on a Sunday rather than a weekday? How many registered nurses are on duty then, and for how many residents?
2. Medicare's records show a citation at the most serious level. What happened, and what changed afterwards?
3. Who will actually be caring for my relative at 3am on a Saturday — an agency nurse or someone on staff?