Ridgewood Specialty Care

Ridgewood Specialty Care is a nursing home located in Ottumwa, Iowa, a city with a total of 30,220 people. We have a high opinion of this facility, which we gave a B+ overall. We were equally impressed with the city grade of facilities in Ottumwa, making this one of the best places to find a nursing home. You can certainly do much worse than this place. This nursing home's strong report card was highlighted by its inspection reports, which we will address in the next paragraph.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing rating is largely associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a grade of B. Short-term care scores are vital for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who returned home from this nursing home. We found that it performed respectably with 45.7 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home's worst area is long-term care, which is the last area we analyzed. For this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. We want to to draw your attention to this potential weak link, but you shouldn't over-emphasize a single bad category either. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.09 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.