Friendship Home Association

Friendship Home Association is a small non-profit nursing home located in Audubon, Iowa. We gave this facility an overall grade of B. A score of this caliber requires respectable scores in most areas. Based on our ratings, you could do much worse than this place. This place's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection rating, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to earning a great overall rating, this nursing home fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the nursing home's recent government inspections. We awarded it an A+ for this category, which is one of our highest grades. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. Our nursing score is mostly based on the facility's nurse staffing. This place provides a very impressive 4.1 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is among the highest figures in the country. Lastly, this facility was also above average in each of the major quality measures we assessed in this category. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a score of B. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 93.29269 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's weakest category is short-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. Short-term care grades are typically used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 30.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.