North Central Health Care

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a strong short-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its best category. In that category, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of A. Short-term care grades are commonly used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of B+. It performed more favorably than most nursing homes in this category. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 91.98113 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a few points less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility was awarded a high-end nursing score. We awarded it a grade of B+ in that area, rounding out one of our more impressive profiles. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning residents even once per day.