Faith Lutheran Home

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in nursing, where it earned a grade of A. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 place Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more often.

Adding to its first-rate profile, this facility also was given a superb long-term care score, with a score of A. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the third area, this nursing home also received a grade of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is more often than not a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Finally, we also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.