Southview Acres Health Care Center

We awarded this facility one of our better scores in short-term care, where it received an A-. This is notably better than the nursing home's overall score, which was certainly not elite. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is typically a solid assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that category, which is one of our better scores. There are quite a few factors included in this area. Many of the datapoints are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 facility 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 employing a system of turning a resident at least once a day.

We also found that this nursing home has received favorable government inspections in recent years. In fact, we awarded it a B- in this category. This is better than many facilities in this category. Inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The last area we rated was long-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is a poor score. This is clearly a major concern. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 75.41322 percent of its patients. This is pretty significantly below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.