Norwalk Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Norwalk Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is one of just two nursing homes in Norwalk, Iowa. This nursing home received an overall grade of C, which is a good rating. Based on our analysis, this nursing home has some redeeming qualities. One of the major highlights of this facility's profile is its exemplary inspection grade, which you can find in the next section.

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's second best category turned out to be its short-term care score, where it was given a grade of C. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. Finally, we considered the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that it performed respectably in this metric with 49 percent of its patients returning home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This place provides only 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below the national average. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in some quality-focused statistics. We especially look at the percent of patients who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are indicators of the quality of nursing care, since superior care tends to reduce these problems.

This nursing home's least impressive category was long-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.33 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.