Fond Du Lac Lutheran Home

While this place's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually received a very good score in the area of inspections. We awarded it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid facilities that have a long list of severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home also received a favorable grade in our short-term care category. We awarded this facility an above average grade of B in this area. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. We analyzed the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, although this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric.

The final area we scored was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is a very poor grade. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 96.482414 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.