Essentia Health Grace Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. There are many datapoints within this category. Many of these factors relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also would like to alert you to the fact that this facility received a top-shelf grade of A in our short-term care area. With our short-term care assessment, we try to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately 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 facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In the final area, this nursing home also was given a first-rate long-term care grade, with a B+. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.