Griggs County Care Center

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors 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.

This nursing home also was elite in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Very few facilities received a better grade in this category. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home was given a strong short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher grades in that category with a grade of B+. Short-term care ratings are vital for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we scored was nursing. This nursing home received an impressive nursing rating this year, with a grade of B-. Even though this wasn't quite as dominant as several of its other scores, this is nevertheless an acceptable grade in that category. Our nursing grade includes many components, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared with most nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.