Algona Manor Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, this place was assessed a category L deficiency, which was unexpected given its inspection grade. This category indicates the government inspectors identified a widespread deficiency placing resident safety or health in immediate danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

This facility was awarded strong marks in the area of short-term care as well. Indeed, it received one of our most superb grades in that category with a area of A-. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is typically a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weighed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient more frequently.

The next area we assessed was nursing, is this facility's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. This really is one of the few dings of a very solid profile. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 99.21875 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.