Independence Village Senior Living - Waukee

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is frequently a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. 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. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 70.5 percent of its patients returning home. This is a far higher rate than most facilities.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in inspections, which is based on its inspection reports. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that area, which is one of our top scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provided 4.7 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is among the more impressive totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by these statistics. On top of providing high levels of care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls leading to major injury, this nursing home performed as well as any facility the state.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility really didn't fare very well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area, this is clearly this facility's poorest grade. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home didn't perform well in our measures relating to resident care. Even though we determined this facility had a favorable amount of nursing care provided by nurses aids and other nursing staff, we found its vaccine statistics to be somewhat slightly lower than we anticipated. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 79.518074 percent of its residents. This is a statistic we would like to see this nursing home bring up. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.78 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.