Dubuque Specialty Care

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that category with a grade of A. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

We also awarded this nursing home an impressive score in short-term care. This nursing home earned a B in this category, which is one of our more impressive scores. Our short-term care scores are presumably more meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country in this area with 56 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this area. This place provided just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most other facilities. While this facility ranked poorly in terms of the quantity of nursing care offered, it actually performed admirably in some of our quality-based metrics. In fact, it was above average in two of the areas we assess, with favorable scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next category we graded was long-term care. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. Our long-term care ratings are pivotal for people needing non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 95.87629 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable percentage. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. While it had 1.95 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than the majority of nursing homes due to it having some more complex patients.