Northern Montana Care Center

With an address in Havre, Montana, Northern Montana Care Center is the sole nursing home we were able to find in the city. This turns out to be an A+ facility, which is our very best grade. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top ten percent of all nursing homes in the United States. If you look further down this page, you will see this nursing home's category scores, which are also impressive.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home earned near flawless health inspections recently. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A+. The nursing grade is based on a variety of datapoints. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular facility provided 5.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was one of the higher figures we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With below 5 percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls. Many pressure ulcers could be prevented by offering better nursing care and a system of turning patients more often.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded a superb grade of A in our long-term care area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 93.0921 percent of its residents, which is a bit below what we anticipated. Clearly, this nursing home 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. This topped off a first-rate report card. Short-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 42.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.