American Lutheran Home-Mondovi

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home also was dominant in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few facilities received a better grade in this area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is generally a reliable assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing rating is based on a variety of datapoints. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents more often.

The next category we scored is this facility's poorest category. Nevertheless, even its weakest link would likely be a strength for most nursing homes. In fact, we gave it a favorable grade of B for long-term care. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.