Patty Elwood Center

Patty Elwood Center is in Cresco, Iowa, a city with 5,967 people. This facility received an excellent grade of A- overall. This is even higher than the city grade of A- in Cresco, which is also well above average. This is just about as good of a facility as you're going to find. This facility was also given phenomenal ratings in all four of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually perfect. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 92.40506 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.21 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final area, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its short-term care score. This rounded out a very favorable profile. In crafting these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.