Autumn Care of Madison

In addition to earning a great overall rating, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A for this area, which is one of our best grades. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.19355 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing rating is primarily based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did very well in this subcategory. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

The next area we assessed is this facility's worst area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still gave it an acceptable grade of B- for short-term care. In crafting these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we considered the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.