Pioneer Nursing Home

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. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to receive more than one A+ category grades. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is generally a solid measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. We assessed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.

The last area we assessed was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. While this is its least impressive category rating, this is still a strong grade. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. 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 residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.