Essentia Health Grace Home

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. In determining our nursing scores, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. 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 Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home received high marks in the category of long-term care. For this reason, it was given one of our best grades in that area with a score of A+. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our final area, this facility also performed well in the short-term care category. We gave it an A for that category. This rounded out truly elite report card. In forming these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.