Gundersen St. Elizabeth's Hospital

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection score. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the highest complements we can offer a nursing home. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. The nursing grade considers a host of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our next category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care score. This is a superb score. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for our short-term care score. This completed a very strong report card. Our short-term care grades are probably more meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.