Clarkfield Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home was awarded a superb score of A- in our short-term care category. In the category of short-term care, we strive to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home received an excellent long-term care grade. While this is not nearly as impressive as some of its other category grades, this is still one of the stronger scores a facility can receive. 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. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.59036 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.