Aspirus Care & Rehab-Medford

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it earned one of our best scores in that area with an A+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. There are quite a few criteria included in this area. Many of the datapoints reflect nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong long-term care grade. This actually is its third best category score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the final category we assessed, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of A in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility topped off a straight A report card. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.