Auburn Home in Waconia

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections are nearly perfect. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a impressive short-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being this facility's second strongest category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility also received a high-end long-term care score. Indeed, this is this nursing home's third best category score. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A-. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 95.833336 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we looked at was nursing, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B-. Even though this proved to be its poorest category grade, this is still a middle of the pack score. Our nursing grade weighs several data points. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.