Essentia Health Fosston

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 licensure of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

On the list of its many elite scores, this nursing home received an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep 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.

We also wanted to note the fact that this nursing home received a high-end grade of A- in our short-term care area. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is typically a fair assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

For the last category we assessed, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not 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.