Cedars at St. Louis Park, a Villa Center

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially would like to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A- in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

Turning to the fourth area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in the area of long-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category rating. Of course, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Long-term care ratings of this caliber 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. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 85.626915 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.