Essentia Health Northern Pines Medical Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. We analyzed the levels of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation 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 employing a protocol of moving patients more often.

Another quality feature of this facility is its inspection rating. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem 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.

In our final category, we awarded this facility an A- for our short-term care score. This completed an elite profile. Our short-term care grade is typically used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.