Mercy Health Services- Iowa Corp

Mercy Health Services- Iowa Corp is a very-small hospital-based nursing home located in Mason City, Iowa. Featuring an overall rating of A+, this facility is ranked among the most impressive nursing homes we assessed. As far as we can see, this place should be a wonderful choice for most people. Headlining this place's exemplary profile is its inspection grade, which we will address 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. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are typically employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This place is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. The facility provided roughly one and a half times as many physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the nation in this area with 73.5 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Turning our third category, this high end nursing home also performed remarkably in the category of long-term care. In this category, we gave it a A+. Very few facilities fared better in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we analyzed is nursing. We gave them another great score of A+ in this category. This rounded out a flawless profile of A+'s. Our nursing rating weighs many data points, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This particular facility provided 7.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This was one of the more impressive figures we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in Iowa when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.