Pioneer House

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A-. We weighed the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The third area we looked at was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a very positive short-term care grade, with a B in the category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It doesn't look like this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The final category we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. While this is not nearly as elite as several of its other grades, this remains an acceptable score in that area. Long-term care grades are typically used to grade a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.