Hegg Memorial Health Center

Hegg Memorial Health Center is located in Rock Valley, Iowa. This nursing home received an A- overall, which is one of our best grades. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top 25 percent of all facilities in the United States. This nursing home's strong report card was highlighted by its inspection score, which is addressed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also excelled in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. This place was also able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.

This facility also received a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, this ended up being this nursing home's third strongest category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was nursing. This nursing home was given a better than average nursing rating this year, with a grade of B-. Even though this was not as impressive as many of its other category grades, this remains an acceptable rating in this area. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place provides an impressive 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in some of the metrics we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally good measures of the quality of nursing care provided.