Appleton Municipal Hospital

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care rating. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility received a dominant score of A- in our short-term care category. With our short-term care assessment, we attempt to forge a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Lastly, we wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them a B+ in this category. This wraps up a very strong report card. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.