Meadowbrook at Appleton

While we gave this nursing home a terrible overall score, we gave it a C for our short-term care rating. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most critical for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of C. Few facilities fared better in this category. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

Unfortunately, this nursing home received very poor government inspection reports in recent years, causing them to receive a lowly F for inspections. An F in this category is typically a sign that there were red flags on the facility's government inspections. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection grade, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This facility had 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines of more than $100,000. This usually suggests that a nursing home's bad track record spanned multiple years.

The last area we scored is long-term care, in which this facility was given a very poor score in this area as well. It received an F in this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. Facilities that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to just 85.71429 percent of its patients, which is several points lower than we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.