Urbandale Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility received high scores in nursing as well. In fact, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an B-. Our nursing grade assesses quite a few datapoints, but the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

We also gave this facility a middle of the road score in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of B-. Short-term care scores are vital for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Our next area is long-term care, in which we gave this facility a grade of C in that area. Our long-term care grades are more critical for people requiring more conventional assistance associated with activities of daily living. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.65871 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable total. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.