Stearns Nursing & Rehab Center

While we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it earned a relatively impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our more favorable grades in that category with a B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. This particular nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an C. Our nursing grade includes a number of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The next category we assessed was short-term care, in which this facility received an F. With our short-term care assessment, we attempt to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Moving on to the final category, this facility didn't fare well here either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as terrible as it gets. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home provided the vaccine to a relatively low 38.251366 percent of its residents, which is a bit of a concern. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.