Meadowbrook at Chetek

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

We also awarded this nursing home a positive grade in long-term care. This facility earned a B in this category, which is one of our more favorable grades. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home was awarded its next most favorable category score in the category of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this area, which is a decent score. Short-term care grades are often used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.

This nursing home's least impressive category was nursing, which is the last area we looked at. For this area, we gave this nursing home a D. Our nursing score consists of several factors, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.