Cedarburg Health Services

On top of receiving a great overall score, this nursing home also received an elite nursing rating. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Among this nursing home's other strengths is its first-rate short-term care score. We gave them one of our more impressive scores in that area, with a grade of A. With our short-term care category, we try to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Another area of strength for this nursing home is in the area of inspections. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

The last category we rated is long-term care, which was this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Unfortunately, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.5 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.