Iowa Veterans Home

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing score is mostly tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 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 facility the nation 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 system of moving a patient more often.

The third area we analyzed is long-term care. Contributing to its impressive profile, this facility also excelled in that category. In fact, we gave it a of A in that category. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.1635 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the last category we assessed, this facility was given a very strong grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a very impressive profile. Our short-term care scores are arguably more meaningful for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.