Colonial Manor of Elma

Colonial Manor of Elma is a small nursing home located in Elma, Iowa. This facility appears to be one of the higher-rated nursing homes we assessed. A grade of this caliber requires first-rate scores across the board. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top quarter of all facilities in the nation. The best part of this facility's strong report card is its inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next section

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities performed better in this category. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. There are a variety of datapoints within this grade. Many of these datapoints relate to staffing levels. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as good measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care, in which this facility was awarded a B. This actually is this facility's worst area. A facility could be doing a lot worse when it's poorest grade still is superior to most facilities. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. This place was above average in this area with 49.4 percent of its residents returning home.