Nelson Manor

On top of receiving a great overall score, this facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing rating assesses a handful of datapoints, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

In addition, we awarded this facility a B+ in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our better scores. Short-term care grades are often used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's next highest area came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. With our long-term care score, we assess the amount of care provided by a facility, along with a handful of qualitative metrics. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated only 82.8125 percent of its residents for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning our last category of inspections, this nursing home received an F here. This grade was detrimental to this facility's overall score. For facilities with bad inspection ratings, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular facility had 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed large government fines totaling over $100,000. This often signifies that a poor performance has been an issue for multiple years.