Trinity Care Center

With an address in Farmington, Minnesota, Trinity Care Center is the sole nursing home we were able to find in the city. This turns out to be a grade A facility, which is a high-end grade. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the country. One of the major highlights of this facility's stellar report card is its nursing grade. Nursing grades are discussed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 4.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was one of the higher figures we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this place was also above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we looked at in this category. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility also received a virtually flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. This is one of the few places to receive multiple A+ category grades. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also was dominant in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this category. Our short-term care grades are presumably more critical for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home is above average in terms of both its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This place performed respectably with 45.1 percent of its patients returning home.

The next area we scored was long-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable score in this area, with a C. While this is not as favorable as several of its other grades, it is nevertheless not the end of the world. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of providing solid levels of nurse staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This figure is higher than many nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.23 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.