Five Counties Nursing Home: Sanitation Violation - SD
The March 12 inspection turned up a single deficiency, but it was one rooted in the basics of food service sanitation. Staff were cloth-drying equipment and utensils that are required under South Dakota's Administrative Rules for Lodging and Food Service to be air-dried after sanitizing. The rules are specific: after sanitizing, equipment must air-dry or drain adequately before use. Cloth-drying is not an acceptable substitute, with one narrow exception for utensils that have already been air-dried and are being polished with a clean, dry cloth.
What inspectors found did not meet that standard.
The rules governing how clean equipment must be stored are equally precise. Items must be kept in a clean, dry location, protected from splash, dust, and other contamination. They must be positioned to drain and permit air drying. They must be covered or inverted. The point of all of it is to prevent recontamination of surfaces that residents will eat from, drink from, or that will come into contact with their food.
Cloth-drying, when done improperly, works against that. A cloth that isn't demonstrably clean and dry can transfer bacteria back onto a surface that was just sanitized. The inspection report classified the violation at the lowest level of harm, noting minimal harm or potential for actual harm, but also noted that many residents were affected, meaning the practice was not isolated to a single meal or a single shift.
Five Counties Nursing Home sits at 405 6th Avenue West in Lemmon, a town of roughly 1,200 people in the northwest corner of South Dakota, near the North Dakota border. For residents who rely entirely on the facility for their meals, the kitchen's practices are not an abstraction. They eat what the kitchen produces, with the equipment the kitchen uses, every day.
The inspection produced no findings beyond the sanitation deficiency. There were no medication violations, no staffing citations, no findings related to resident care or abuse. The single-page deficiency statement focused entirely on how equipment was handled after the sanitizing step, the last line of defense before a utensil or piece of equipment reaches a resident's food.
Inspectors reviewed the state administrative rules during the survey and documented the gap between what those rules require and what was happening in the facility's kitchen. The facility's plan of correction was not included in the publicly available inspection materials. CMS directs anyone seeking that information to contact the nursing home or the state survey agency directly.
The deficiency was not classified as immediate jeopardy, the most serious designation available to federal inspectors, and it did not result in the kind of enforcement action that triggers fines or threatens a facility's Medicare and Medicaid certification. It was a standard citation, the kind that gets documented, reported, and then addressed through whatever corrective steps the facility chooses to take.
But the classification of a violation as low-level does not mean the underlying practice is inconsequential. Sanitizing equipment kills pathogens. Improper drying after sanitizing can reintroduce them. For elderly residents, many of whom have compromised immune systems, a foodborne illness that a younger, healthier person might shake off in a day can become something much more serious.
The residents of Five Counties Nursing Home had no way of knowing, when they sat down to eat, how the equipment that prepared or served their food had been handled after it was washed.
That is what the inspection found, and what the record now shows.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Five Counties Nursing Home from 2025-03-12 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Corrections: We strive for accuracy in everything we publish. If you believe any fact in this article is incorrect, please contact us with details, and we will review and correct it promptly.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: November 11, 2026 · Our methodology
Five Counties Nursing Home in LEMMON, SD was cited for violations during a health inspection on March 12, 2025.
The March 12 inspection turned up a single deficiency, but it was one rooted in the basics of food service sanitation.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.