Trinity nursing home gets perfect marks
At Trinity Care Center, being perfect feels pretty good. The Farmington nursing home learned recently that it has received a zero-deficiency rating from the Minnesota Department of Health for the second consecutive year. With thousands of areas where a facility could potentially trip up, that’s not easy to do.By: Nathan Hansen, The Farmington Independent
At Trinity Care Center, being perfect feels pretty good.
The Farmington nursing home learned recently that it has received a zero-deficiency rating from the Minnesota Department of Health for the second consecutive year. With thousands of areas where a facility could potentially trip up, that’s not easy to do.
According to results on the health department’s web site, only nine of 508 facilities surveyed in 2006, the most recent period for which information is available, received zero-deficiency ratings.
“It’s unbelievable the number of things you’ve got to do right,” said Rich Ludwig, Trinity Care Center administrator. “It’s really difficult to be perfect.”
The four-day survey starts with interviews of nursing home residents and their families. If investigators hear a common complaint, they’ll investigate further. They also spend time looking back at diagnoses and making sure the medications patients receive match the evaluations they’ve received.
“If they look at an assessment that we do that they don’t agree with it, they write that up,” Ludwig said. “If there’s a thread there, if there’s more than one, that becomes a deficiency.”
Infrequently occurring problems don’t typically get identified as deficiencies. A complaint about the occasional meal isn’t a problem, but if all of the residents tell investigators the food is regularly terrible it becomes an issue.
Ludwig said hard work and good policies are the reason for Trinity’s good ratings.
“If we identify problems, we deal with them immediately,” he said. “We retrain the employee. Some employees aren’t meant to be in this business, and we weed them out.”
Ludwig said the zero-deficiency rating is good news during a difficult time for nursing homes.
“In this time of poor financing, of not getting funding from our state government, we haven’t been able to give any raises hardly at all for the past six to 10 years,” Ludwig said. “Our staff is still able to perform at a high level.”
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