Pioneer House

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a top-shelf long-term care grade. This actually is this nursing home's second best category grade. In that area, this facility received a grade of A. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 96.39639 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In our final area, this facility also was given a first-rate short-term care rating, with a B+. This finished off a very favorable report card. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is frequently a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.