Buffalo Lake Health Care Center

Buffalo Lake Health Care Center is a small non-profit nursing home located in Buffalo Lake, Minnesota. This nursing home turns out to be an A rated facility. This facility was given one of the best scores that we offer. A grade in this range requires superb marks across the board. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top 20 percent of all facilities in the nation. As you can find below, this facility also performed just fine in our category ratings. It is hard to poke holes in this nursing home's profile.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical area. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this nursing home also was given a dominant long-term care score, with a score of A. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to offering very impressive levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.41521 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. This combination proved to be successful as this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.08 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing grade features a variety of subcategories. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. With 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home surpassed the overwhelming majority of facilities. Lastly, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Minnesota in this category.

Turning to our last area, this facility also performed well in the short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a B+ in this area. This topped off a very strong profile. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 39.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.