Northern Mahaska Specialty Care

While we were not very complementary of this facility's overall grade, it actually received an impressive grade of A- in the area of nursing. Nursing ratings are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's second most respectable score was short-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that area. This still happens to be a well below average score. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Unfortunately, this place received an F for its inspection grade. This is a very important category. Grades in this range generally mean we found some red flags on the facility's government inspection reports. For nursing homes with poor inspection scores, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received large government fines in recent years totaling over $100,000. This often indicates that a facility's bad performance has been an issue for multiple years.

The final area we assessed was long-term care. It received an F for this area, which is a poor score. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 98.38057 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.