Colonial Manor of Amana

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 our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Adding to its high-end achievements in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing score assesses many datapoints, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility also performed well in our long-term care category. We awarded it a grade of B+ for this area. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.