Hastings Senior Health & Living

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area typically have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given high marks in the area of short-term care. For this reason, it received one of our highest scores in that area with a grade of A+. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home also received an A+ long-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be given several A+ category grades. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our final category, this nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing rating, completing an amazing profile of A+'s in each of our categories. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.