Capitol View Transitional Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. We were not able to locate deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country in this area with 65.8 percent of its patients returning home.

Moving on our next category, we gave this facility a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This is a very impressive rating. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A in our nursing category. With this score, the facility finished off a straight A profile. When calculating our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This place provided 7 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is among the higher totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by these statistics. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in Minnesota in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.