Elm Heights Care Center

Elm Heights Care Center is a facility located in Shenandoah, Iowa. This city has 6,025 people. This nursing home was given an A- overall, which is one of our more impressive ratings. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top third of all facilities in the country. The best part of this facility's strong report card was its inspection grade. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A+. There are many factors within this area. Most of the criteria are tied to nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.

This facility also received a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B in this category. With our short-term care category, we seek to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 35.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next area we assessed was this nursing home's weakest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for our long-term care category. In computing our long-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.21 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.