Oelwein Health Care Center

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Our inspection grades are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its 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 awarded an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.43503 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing score looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

The next category we looked at was this nursing home's weakest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it an acceptable grade of C for short-term care. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.