Whitewater Health Services

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing grade. The nursing grade weighs many factors, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 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 Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home also was given a strong short-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes 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 item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility earned a grade of B for its inspections grade. This is an above average grade in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

The final area we assessed is long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We gave this facility a D in this category. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Nursing homes that don't score well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 79.03226 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly less than the national average. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.