Fort Dodge Health and Rehabilitation

In addition to having a decent overall score, we also want to point out that this nursing home received favorable health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in this area, with a grade of B+. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall grade. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged 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' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an B+. Few facilities fared better in this category. Nursing ratings are largely associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

This nursing home's third most favorable area ended up being its short-term care score, where it received a grade of B-. In forming our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final item we considered in this area is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Moving on to our fourth area, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this was this nursing home's weakest area. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 98.99497 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.