Lakeshore

Lakeshore is in Duluth, Minnesota. The city has 116,688 people. We gave this facility an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top third of all nursing homes in the United States. Based on all of the relevant data, you can't go wrong with this place. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care rating, which is addressed in the next section.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In determining these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This facility is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it offered roughly 50% more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. This is what we look for when assessing a nursing home in this category. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Minnesota in this area with 71.2 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for inspections. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. There are a host of criteria within this grade. Most of these subcategories relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 4.6 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This was one of the higher totals we found. Furthermore, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. In addition to offering high levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any facility in the country in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these areas as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.

The final area we assessed was long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. This actually is this facility's least impressive category. This is still not the end of the world. In calculating our long-term care ratings, we scrutinize the personal care received by the nursing home's patients. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.