The North Shore Estates

Located in Duluth, Minnesota, The North Shore Estates is one of eight nursing homes in this area. Sporting an overall grade of B, this is a very respectable option. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Duluth. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's profile is its impressive short-term care rating, which we will address in the next section.

In addition to earning a strong overall grade, this facility fared well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. Short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. It fared as well as just about any nursing home in Minnesota in this area with 58.2 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for that area, which is one of our best grades. This is one of the few facilities with an overall score in this range which received multiple category grades this high. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing score is based on several factors, but the main one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we assessed is long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in that area. This is a decent grade in this area. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for residents needing more traditional assistance related to activities of daily living. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 98.9899 percent of its residents, which is an above average datapoint. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.83 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this statistic can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.