Heartland Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In this area, we awarded it an A-. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing scores are mostly tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident more frequently.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is often a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Switching gears to the next area, this facility was given an acceptable long-term care score. While this is not as impressive as a few of its other category grades, this is truly not a bad grade. In calculating these long-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's personal care services. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.