Sioux Center Health Royale Meadows

Located in Sioux Center, Iowa, Sioux Center Health Royale Meadows is the only option we found in this city. This nursing home was awarded an A- overall, which is one of the most impressive ratings that we offer. A grade of this caliber requires first-rate marks across the board. Based on our analysis, you can't go wrong with this facility. This place's impressive report card was highlighted by its nursing rating, which you can find in the next paragraph.

On top of earning a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in nursing. In fact, we gave it an A for that category. Our nursing grade is based on several factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

To complement its top-shelf assessments in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A for its long-term care score. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. We weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our final category, this facility was awarded an extremely favorable short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that category, completing one of our better profiles. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.