Crest Haven Care Centre

With an address in Creston, Iowa, Crest Haven Care Centre is one of just a couple nursing homes in this area. This nursing home turns out to be a middle of the road facility, with an overall grade of B-. Based on our ratings, there are certainly far worse places out there. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's report card is its exemplary inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility received favorable short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second highest grade. Our short-term care ratings are probably more meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also factored in a few quality-based metrics in this category. While this facility did not rank well in terms of nursing hours per resident, it fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is often a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented with better nursing care.

The next category we rated was long-term care, which was this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is certainly very disappointing. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.169815 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.68 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.