United Pioneer Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned a very impressive long-term care score. This was its best grade. In this area, we gave this facility an A. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.10715 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this facility also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A. Our inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing grade is mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 facility Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient more frequently.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade. We gave it an A- in that area, giving this facility straight A's. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.