Accura Healthcare of Cresco

Accura Healthcare of Cresco is a small nursing home located in Cresco, Iowa. This nursing home really stands out with a grade of A overall. Remarkably, this is even higher than the city grade of A- in Cresco, which is one of the higher rated cities in Iowa. Based on the data we reviewed, you can't go wrong with this facility. This nursing home also received consistently good ratings in all four of the major categories. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

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. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing score is mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home offers 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which more than one hour was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly skilled nurses. In determining our nursing ratings, we add more significance to hours provided by registered or licensed nurses. 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home was awarded a strong score of A- in our long-term care category. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.86 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care. This facility received a favorable nursing score this year, with a B. Although this is not as impressive as many of its other category grades, this remains one of our more favorable grades for that area. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 26.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home rather than remaining at the nursing home permanently.