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 short-term care score. This is a very strong rating. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. 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, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home was awarded a highly favorable long-term care score. We gave it an A- in this area, rounding out a straight A profile. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.445595 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.