Iowa Lutheran Hospital

Iowa Lutheran Hospital is in Des Moines, Iowa. The city has 212,318 people. With an A+ overall grade, we ranked this facility number 158 in the United States. This puts it in the top one percent of all nursing homes. We also wanted to point out that this nursing home is located in a hospital. Typically, this means that more intensive healthcare services are available. Headlining this facility's exemplary report card is its inspection score, which is addressed in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ short-term care score. This is simply as elite as it gets in this category. Our short-term care grades are crucial for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This place excelled in two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility supplied about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than a typical nursing home. This is definitely an encouraging sign. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Iowa in this area with 69.4 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In the third area we looked at, this facility received elite marks in the category of long-term care. As a result, it was given one of our highest scores in that area with a of A+. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final category, this facility also was awarded a first-rate nursing rating, with an A. This wrapped up a very strong report card. Nursing scores are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provided 6.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is among the more impressive figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by these statistics. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any facility in the nation in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these statistics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care offered.