Cedar Falls Health Care Center

Although we were not complementary of this facility's overall score, it actually earned an impressive short-term care score this year. We gave it a grade of B+ in this category, which proved to be a rare glimmer of hope in its profile. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an B. Our nursing rating considers numerous subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages 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 place 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 typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home received a grade of just D in the area of inspections. Our inspection grades factor in many items found on the nursing home's inspection reports. When you find severe deficiencies on the reports, this is typically a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This facility had a category G through L deficiency, which are among the more serious deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies uncovered by CMS had potential to cause actual harm to patients. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines in recent years of more than $100,000. This generally signifies that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for more than one year.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home did not perform well in this area either. With a poor grade of F in long-term care, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category may not provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other nursing homes provide. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 70.93024 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than the national average. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.