Wisconsin Veterans Home at King

To go along with a strong overall grade, we gave this place an A+ for inspections. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A+. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent 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 facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also fared very well in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities fared better in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.6139 percent of its patients, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored was short-term care, where this facility was given an A-. This rounded out a very impressive profile. Few facilities received an A- or better in every category. Our short-term care scores are likely more critical for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.