Lake Minnetonka Care Center

Lake Minnetonka Care Center is a very-small nursing home located in Excelsior, Minnesota. This nursing home received an uninspiring overall grade of D, which is a relatively poor grade. This place seems to have very little working in its favor. We wouldn't blame you if you're ready to stop reading and find another facility. However, if you want to learn more about this facility's category grades, inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

Although we did not rate this nursing home well overall, we want to point out its decent health inspection reports in recent years. We gave it a relatively respectable grade of B- in that area. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provides only 2.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, where this facility was given a B- in this category. Our short-term care grades are important for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The key is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

The final area we graded was long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 91.25 percent of its residents. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.