Norris Square

On top of faring well overall, this facility earned nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it earned one of our best scores in that area with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without having access to complete information regarding deficiencies for this facility, it is difficult to evaluate the place in the inspections category.

To add to its high-end performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care rating. In forming these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more often.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a strong grade of B. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 98.3871 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.