Centracare Health - Monticello

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.6 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Turning the page to our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care score. This is a very strong rating. 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. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.386505 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. Only a select few nursing homes received a B+ or better in every single category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is typically a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.