Pigeon Falls Health Care Center

To go along with a strong overall score, we awarded this place an A+ for our inspection category. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility also was strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Not many facilities fared better in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to our last category, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for this area. This finalized a very impressive profile. Our short-term care grades are probably more important for residents requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.