Marshfield Clinic Comfort and Recovery-Eau Claire

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, it also received A+ government inspections recently. Its inspections are virtually flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top-shelf nursing home also dominated in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Very few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning the page to our third category, we gave this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a dominant score. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the final area, this facility also performed well in the nursing category. In fact, we awarded it an A- for this area. This rounded out truly elite profile. The nursing score assesses many data points, but the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.