Charter House

We also would like to note that this nursing home excelled in our nursing rating. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 1.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

This facility also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the rare nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This is based on the facility's inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider 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.

Moving on our third area, this exemplary facility also fared very well in the category of short-term care. In this area, it received a A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this category. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this nursing home was awarded an extremely favorable long-term care score. We gave it a grade of A in that category, giving this facility straight A's. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.