CentraCare - Sartell Therapy Suites

In addition to receiving an elite overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ inspection grade. This grade is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can offer a nursing home. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A+. Very few facilities fared better in this category. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on 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 ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning our third area, this nursing home received a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a score of A in this area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were not able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category we graded, this facility was given a very strong grade of A in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility rounded out a straight A profile. The nursing score includes a host of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.