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 nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that category with a grade of B+. In our short-term care score, we try to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. 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. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we rated is long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a C. This is this facility's least impressive category. This is still a middle of the pack score. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.2126 percent of its patients, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. This nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.