Hiawatha Care Center

On top of receiving a great overall score, this facility received an A+ in our short-term care rating. Short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. In calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home an acceptable score in this area, with a grade of B-. While this was not as high as many of its other scores, it is still a middle of the pack score. Long-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of nursing services. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 99.71429 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.