Minnesota Masonic Home Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In crafting our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

The next area we analyzed turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. However, even its weakest link would likely be a strength for many nursing homes. We awarded it a favorable grade of B for long-term care. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 97.539154 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.