Mercy Health Services- Iowa Corp

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an elite grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple minor dings aren't something to panic about.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 having a policy of turning a resident more often.

The final area we graded was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of C. While this wound up being its worst category grade, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's personal care rather than the skilled nursing or medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided information on its vaccination levels. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.