Westview of Indianola Care Center

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ inspections recently. Its inspections were nearly perfect. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this category. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing ratings are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

The final area we looked at was short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. While this proved to be its least impressive category grade, this is nevertheless a good grade. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most meaningful for those in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.