Griggs County Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important category. Inspection scores are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This exemplary nursing home also dominated in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes performed better in this category. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning patients even once per day.

In our final category, this nursing home also was given a very strong short-term care grade, with a grade of A-. This finished off an elite profile. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.