Dubuque Specialty Care

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of A. This is a much better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

This facility also was given a positive grade in our short-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B in this area. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is more often than not a solid assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Our nursing score consists of a handful of factors, but the main consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is well below average. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Switching gears to the last category, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this was its poorest category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 96.62447 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.