Edgewood Convalescent Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing score is mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient more often.

Turning to the third category, this facility also received a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 48.333336 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we assessed was short-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B. Even though this is its least impressive category grade, this is nevertheless an above average score. Short-term care grades are typically used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.