Homestead Itasca

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home was awarded its second highest category grade in the category of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this area, which is an acceptable score. Long-term care grades are typically used to score a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This place also excelled at keeping 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's second worse category was short-term care, where it received just a D in that category. This is a relatively poor grade. Our short-term care ratings are important for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The final area we scored is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a poor score. This is obviously a major disappointment. Our nursing score considers a number of data points. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its below average nursing hour totals, this place also received poor marks in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We found that a higher percentage of this place's patients suffered falls which led to serious injury.