Woodbury Health Care Center

Woodbury Health Care Center is a large non-profit nursing home located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It looks like this nursing home is one of the higher-graded facilities we assessed. A score in this range requires very strong scores across the board. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top quarter of all nursing homes nationally. The best part of this facility's impressive report card is its inspection score. We discuss inspections in the next section

To go along with a strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded a strong short-term care score. Indeed, this is this nursing home's second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This facility provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is definitely a great sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country in this area with 64.8 percent of its patients returning home.

Moving on our next category, this facility received an excellent long-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A- in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 97.96954 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. While it had 2.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was close to the middle of the pack due to it having more complex patients.

The last category we analyzed is nursing. In this area, we gave this facility a solid grade of B-. This actually proved to be this facility's weakest category. The nursing grade analyzes a handful of data points, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. Based on the CMS data, this nursing home offers 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This facility was relatively weak in two of the data points we look at, with subpar scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are usually reliable measures of the quality of nursing care offered.