Mercy Medical Center - Sioux City

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also received A+ inspections in recent years. Its inspections are nearly flawless. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we assessed this facility so favorably is that it was given an A+ short-term care grade. This is flat out as strong as it gets in this category. With our short-term care score, we strive to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility also was awarded a top-shelf long-term care grade. Indeed, this is this nursing home's third best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to our last category, this nursing home was awarded a highly favorable nursing rating. In fact, we awarded it an A in this category, giving this facility straight A's. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.