Belle Plaine Specialty Care

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

We also awarded this facility a favorable grade in nursing. This facility earned a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better grades. Nursing ratings are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also awarded this nursing home a decent score in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services To have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The next area we rated was long-term care. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is certainly a major concern. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 95.27027 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.