Centracare Health System-Sauk Centre Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home has had near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies 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.

The fourth category we rated is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a B+. This completed a very strong profile. Only a select few facilities earned a B+ or higher in each of our categories. In crafting these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.