Cedar Falls Health Care Center

Neither this facility's overall grade nor its category scores gave us anything positive to point out. Its best category was short-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D. Short-term care grades are often employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. With its grade in this category, we were not surprised to discover that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the data we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

Among this nursing home's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection score. Typically, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. For places with poor inspection ratings, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by CMS had the potential to pose actual harm to patients. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's poor nursing grade where it received an F. Our nursing rating is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This place provided only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next category we scored was long-term care. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 61.490685 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be several points lower than what we were hoping for. 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.