Gundersen Tri-County Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. It does not look like we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was dominant in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing score is mostly tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0 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 typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we assessed is short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable grade in that category, with a grade of B-. Even though this isn't as strong as a few of its other grades, it is still not a terrible score. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.