Cornell Health Services

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this place especially excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Not many facilities fared better in that category. Our inspection grades are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A-. Nursing scores are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 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 facility Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving patients at least once a day.

In addition, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In calculating these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care, which ended up being this facility's weakest area. We gave it a lowly F for this area, which is clearly somewhat concerning. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 99.09091 percent of its patients, which is an above average percentage. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.