Rehabilitation Center of Des Moines

Although we were not complementary of this place's overall performance, it did receive an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a grade of B. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid facilities that had too many deficiencies. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also awarded this facility a grade of C for our nursing rating. Our nursing rating is mostly based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's next best area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this category. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The key is determining what effect this had on quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Moving on to the final category, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable long-term care score of C. Long-term care scores are based on a facility's volume of care. This includes a broad range of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home gave the vaccine to only 83.13253 percent of its residents. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.