Norseland Nursing Home

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. 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 an impressively low number.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents more often.

Racking up another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. It does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home was given an excellent short-term care rating. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category, rounding out a straight A profile. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. It fared as well as just about any facility in Wisconsin in this metric with 66.5 percent of its residents returning home.