Colonial Acres Health Care Center

Colonial Acres Health Care Center is a small non-profit nursing home located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded facilities we assessed. In fact, it was given our most impressive score. As a matter of fact, we ranked this nursing home as the sixth best facility in Minneapolis. One of the major highlights of this facility's stellar report card is its short-term care grade. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more critical for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Minnesota in this area with 74.9 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. We weren't able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provides an incredible 5.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in Minnesota in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.

Switching gears to the final category, this nursing home also performed well in the long-term care category. We awarded it an A for that category. This topped off truly elite profile. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.