Lake Minnetonka Shores

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Short-term care scores are vital for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also received a virtually flawless inspection. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. This was one of the few places to receive multiple A+ category grades. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings aren't the end of the world.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home was given a decent long-term care score. While this wasn't nearly as elite as a few of its other grades, this is still not a bad grade. Long-term care grades focus on a nursing home's personal care instead of the highly skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.59036 percent of its residents. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.