Whispering Pines Nursing and Rehabilitation

Whispering Pines Nursing and Rehabilitation is the only nursing home located in Ripon, Wisconsin. We awarded this nursing home an A overall grade, ranking it in the top fifth of all nursing homes in the nation. This is just about as good of a place as you're going to find. Headlining this place's exemplary report card is its nursing grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing score is primarily associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home offers 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day, of which more than one hour of those were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In computing our nursing ratings, we attach more significance to hours performed by registered or licensed nurses. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 Wisconsin in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a resident at least once a day.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Turning the page to our next category, we gave this nursing home a score of A- for its short-term care score. This is a very strong score. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the majority of facilities in the country with 52.8 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most nursing homes.

The final area we rated was long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility an above average grade of B. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 98.52941 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. 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 a remarkably low number.