Aitkin Health Services

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In determining our nursing grades, we analyze both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

To complement its elite accomplishments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for its short-term care score. Our short-term care grades are believed to be more important for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding another impressive category grade, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of B+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

The last category we analyzed is this facility's poorest area. Nevertheless, even its worst category would be a highlight for most nursing homes. In fact, we awarded it a favorable grade of B in our long-term care category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.