Catholic Eldercare on Main

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. In crafting our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient even once per day.

This facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The next area we rated is long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our better scores in this category, with a grade of B. This facility turned out to be strong in each area we assessed. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 95.80153 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.