Crossroads Care Center of Fond Du Lac

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an B-. Our nursing rating assesses quite a few components, however, the paramount one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

We also awarded this facility a decent grade in the area of short-term care, with a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The key is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's weakest category was long-term care, which is the final category we scored. We gave it a lowly F in this category. Even with some decent grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we would like to to point it out. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities offer. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 93.382355 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is somewhat less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.