Dove Healthcare - South Eau Claire

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In our short-term care category, we try to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. There are quite a few factors within this grade. Many of the factors reflect levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

Switching gears to the final area, this facility received an excellent long-term care rating. We awarded it an A in this area, giving this facility straight A's. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.