Sunny Brook Living Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of nursing. We gave it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a resident more often.

This facility also performed favorably in the area of short-term care, with high-end grade of A- in this category. Short-term care scores are critical for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best category was long-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed somewhat badly. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.565216 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

In the last category of inspections, we gave this nursing home a D for our inspection category. This was its worst category grade, particularly in light of some of the more impressive scores referenced above. Nevertheless, since the inspection data is compiled by a government inspector, we weight it heavily in our assessment. Inspection ratings factor in many items found on the facility's recent inspection reports. If you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is generally the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular nursing home had 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received large government fines of more than $100,000. This often means that a poor performance has been an issue for several years.