Pioneer Health Care Center

Part of the reason this facility performed well overall is it excelled in the category of inspections, with a B+ in that area. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 61.56352 percent of its patients, which is somewhat lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored is short-term care. This facility was given a B- in the category. In our short-term care category, we endeavor to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.