Mercy Medical Center - Sioux City

Mercy Medical Center - Sioux City is a very-small hospital-based nursing home located in Sioux City, Iowa. With an overall score of A+, this nursing home is undoubtedly a phenomenal nursing home. In fact, this nursing home has the distinction of being one of the five best nursing homes in Iowa. Finally, this is a very consistent nursing home with consistent grades in all of the major categories. More information about its category grades is available below.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this category. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Iowa in this area with 77.7 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return 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. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home provided 7.8 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This was one of the highest figures we found. In addition, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. In addition to offering impressive levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in Iowa in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these datapoints as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided.

In our final category, this facility was awarded another A+ for its long-term care grade. This wrapped up an incredible profile of straight A+'s. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home 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 number.