Accura Healthcare of Marshalltown

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this nursing home excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. 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 the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients more frequently.

This nursing home's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. Sadly, it received an F in this area. In spite of some impressive scores in other areas, this score is still a bit concerning so we would like to to point it out. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.