Titonka Care Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. The nursing rating includes a handful of components, but the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home also received a high-end short-term care grade. This actually is this facility's second most impressive category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was awarded a strong grade of A- in our long-term care category. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 97.67442 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Finally, this facility also received a virtually flawless government inspection. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of A-. With this impressive grade, this place is one of the few nursing homes in Iowa to receive straight A's. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.