Ascension Living - Lakeshore at Siena

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Short-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. When calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

Amazingly, we also awarded this nursing home yet another A+ in the area of inspections. Inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a grade of B. Even though this is not on par with many of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless an excellent grade. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.