Cuyuna Regional Medical Center

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. Nursing scores are largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. 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 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a resident more often.

This facility has earned near flawless inspections recently. We awarded them an A in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. 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.

Turning our third category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its short-term care grade. This is a dominant grade. Short-term care scores are critical for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home finished off an elite profile. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.3421 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.