Essentia Health Northern Pines Medical Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this facility also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A-. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Building on its fine resume, this nursing home also was given a dominant short-term care grade, with a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The fourth area we assessed is nursing, where this facility received a grade of B+. This rounded out a first-rate profile. Not many nursing homes received a B+ or better in every category. The nursing rating analyzes many data points, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.