The Villa at St Louis Park

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality facility is it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care scores are probably more meaningful for patients in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Building on its impressive profile, this place also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we gave it an B+ for that category. In determining our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients more often.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it excelled in inspections, with a B in that category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Switching gears to our last category, this facility was awarded a grade of C in long-term care, which is an acceptable grade. In crafting our long-term care grades, we look at the facility's personal care services. On top of 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 92.94118 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.07 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.