Cuyuna Regional Medical Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this facility an A+. Nursing ratings are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more often.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility received a strong score of A in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

In the last category we assessed, this nursing home was awarded an impressive grade grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.98658 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.