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 fared well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which happens to be one of our better grades. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

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. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a solid grade in that category, with a B-. While this is not as favorable as several of this facility's other grades, it is still nothing to be ashamed of. Our short-term care grade is typically used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. It doesn't look like this nursing home submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below average.