Hiawatha Care Center

On top of performing well overall, this facility received nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it earned one of our best scores in that area with an A+. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. When computing our nursing scores, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient more often.

Moving on our third area, this nursing home received a strong short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is typically a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

In our final category, this nursing home also was given an impressive long-term care rating, with a grade of B+. This topped off an elite profile. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 93.910255 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.