On With Life - Ankeny Campus

One of the reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to be awarded more than one A+ category grades. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. There are quite a few datapoints included in this grade. Many of these criteria reflect levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we assessed was long-term care, where this facility was given an A. This topped off a first-rate profile. Not many nursing homes earned an A- or higher in every single category. For patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 87.5 percent of its patients. This is a few points lower than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.