Mille Lacs Health System

To go along with its favorable overall grade, we gave this place an A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Another quality feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded a very positive short-term care grade. Indeed, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of B+. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is considered to be a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The final area we assessed is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a D in that area. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 99.23664 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.