Algona Manor Care Center

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. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Surprisingly, this nursing home received a category L deficiency, which was unexpected based on its inspection grade. These are the worst type of deficiencies. This category indicates inspectors discovered a widespread deficiency placing patient health or safety in imminent jeopardy. Even a single deficiency in this category is concerning. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

This facility received high grades in the area of nursing as well. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. Nursing grades are primarily based on the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

Turning to the third category, this facility also earned a score of B for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on to the next area, this facility was awarded an acceptable long-term care grade. Although this wasn't as good as several of its other scores, this is still not a major area of concern. Our long-term care grades are more critical for residents requiring more conventional assistance related to activities of daily living. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinates 99.20635 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this place was also 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.