Dubuque Specialty Care

To go along with its favorable overall performance, we gave this place a grade of A for the area of inspections. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this area. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In computing our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients more often.

The next area we analyzed turned out to be this nursing home's poorest category. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it an acceptable grade of B- for long-term care. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for residents in need of more conventional assistance related to personal care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.969696 percent of its residents. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.