Northgate Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given strong marks in the category of long-term care as well. In fact, it received one of our best grades in that area with a score of A. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 facility Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

The next area we graded is short-term care, in which this nursing home received a grade of C. Although this ended up being its worst category grade, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is more often than not a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.