Cedar Falls Health Care Center

Although we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a decent short-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we found for this facility. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. The last item we considered in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an C. Our nursing score assesses many subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this nursing home's inspection rating where it received a lowly F. This usually means we found some red flags on the government inspection reports. For nursing homes that received this poor of an inspection score, we recommend scrutinizing any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This facility was assessed a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by the government inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. We are also concerned by the fact that this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

The final category we rated is long-term care, in which this facility received a rock bottom score in this category also. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is definitely a major concern. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home did not perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility provided the vaccine to just 72.375694 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.