American Lutheran Home-Menomonie

One of the reasons this place ended up being a quality nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this very important area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many high-end grades, this facility was given a strong long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that area. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a fine short-term care grade. In fact, this is this nursing home's third best category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. In crafting our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to the fourth area, this facility received a very strong nursing grade. In fact, we gave it an A- in that category, rounding out a straight A profile. When determining our nursing scores, we factor in both nursing hours 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 certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.