Mercy Health Services- Iowa Corp

On top of being an elite nursing home overall, this facility excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes fared this well in this area. Our inspection scores are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

This nursing home also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to be given multiple A+ category scores. Short-term care grades are generally used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. The nursing score consists of many components, many of which are tied to levels 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

Switching gears to the last area, this nursing home was given an acceptable long-term care rating. While this isn't nearly as dominant as many of its other grades, this is truly not a terrible score. Our long-term care ratings are meaningful for patients needing personal care. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. It doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted data regarding vaccinations. Finally, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.