Newton Village Health Care Center

Newton Village Health Care Center is one of six facilities located in Newton, Iowa. With an overall grade of A+, this facility wound up being far superior to many of the facilities in Newton. We could not find many bad things to say about this facility. Its ratings are impeccable. If you scroll down, you can see this nursing home's category ratings, which are just as impressive as its overall grade.

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are nearly flawless. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be awarded more than one A+ category grades. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is often a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. This facility excelled at the highest level in two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. This is often an excellent sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 62.3 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

Turning the page to our third area, this high end nursing home also performed remarkably in the category of long-term care. In this area, it received a A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the well above average level of care provided by nurses aids and other staff at this nursing home, we also were pleased by the facility's vaccination statistics. By way of example, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. This combination proved to be effective as this facility 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 a remarkably low number.

Moving on to the next category, this facility also excelled in the nursing category. We gave it an A in this category. This finalized a straight A report card. Our nursing grade is largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This place provided 5.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is among the more impressive figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by both of these figures. On top of providing high levels of care, this place also fared well in several of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average.