Mille Lacs Health System

Mille Lacs Health System is located in Onamia, Minnesota. The city has 3,878 people. With an overall grade of A, this facility is among the top nursing homes we found. We also wanted to point out that this facility is based in a hospital. Typically, this means that more intensive medical services are offered. If you look below, you will see this nursing home's category ratings, which appear to be just as strong as its overall score.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

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. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home offers 3.8 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which more than an hour was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In determining our nursing scores, we add more significance to hours performed by registered nurses. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

In our final category, this nursing home also received an excellent short-term care grade, with an A-. This finished off an elusive straight A report card. In our short-term care assessment, we strive to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses than the typical nursing home. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.