Southside Care Center

Southside Care Center is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which has more than 20 nursing homes. This is a solid facility, with an overall grade of C. Based on our assessment, there are certainly far worse nursing homes out there. One of the better aspects of this facility's profile is its strong nursing rating, which you can find in the next paragraph.

We awarded this facility one of our better scores in nursing, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. We weighed the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This facility provided 2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B. It actually outpaced most nursing homes in this area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The final metric we looked at in this area 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.

This nursing home also earned a very favorable inspection grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home did not fare very well. Due to a poor grade of F in long-term care, this is its worst category. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 63.636364 percent of its residents. This is multiple points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.