Mason City Area Nursing Home

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility was given its next best category grade in the category of long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable score. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's personal care rather than the highly skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facilities third most favorable category was short-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. In our short-term care score, we strive to create a sound measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The important question is whether this also affected quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we analyzed is nursing, which is this facility's worst area. We gave this facility a D in that area. When computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility had bad marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents having falls which led to serious injury. This nursing home was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.