West Ridge Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its short-term care grade. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is typically a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. This place is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it offered about 50% more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical nursing home. This is what we like to find when grading a facility in this category. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Iowa in this area with 71.8 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. There are a host of datapoints included in this category. Many of the datapoints relate to staffing levels. This facility provides an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Of this total, nearly one fourth of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly skilled levels of nurses. Finally, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home the country when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home completed a straight A profile. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.181816 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.