Madison Health Care

Although we didn't rate this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent grade in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Our inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility's long-term care grade appears to be one of its more favorable grades. The nursing home received a C in this area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 51.0101 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a bit below what we expected. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Nursing scores are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home received a rock bottom grade in this category as well. We gave it a lowly F for this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Short-term care scores are meaningful for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last item we considered in this area is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4 percent of its patients returning home.