Centennial Gardens for Nursing & Rehabilitation

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing rating assesses many subcategories, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

This facility also was given a favorable short-term care score. As a matter of fact, we awarded them a B+ in that category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care grades are generally used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care score. This is not an impressive grade. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 84.081635 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit lower than the national average. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

The final category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this nursing home didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We had to give it an F in this category. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we heavily weight a poor performance in this area. This really pulled down this nursing home's overall score. For facilities with bad inspection grades, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 8 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received large government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This usually means that a nursing home's bad track record has been an issue for multiple years.