Centracare Health System-Sauk Centre Nursing Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a very impressive long-term care score. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of A. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. When determining our nursing scores, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. 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 nursing home 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 often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a resident even once per day.

In the final category, this facility also was awarded an excellent short-term care rating, with a grade of B+. This completed a first-rate report card. Our short-term care scores are presumably most important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.