Nodaway Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our long-term care grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 91.58878 percent of its residents. This is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Building on its quality profile, this facility also received favorable health inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a C in the category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.