Nursing homes in Des Moines, Iowa
There are 12 Medicare-certified nursing homes in Des Moines. 6 of them are rated one or two stars, the lowest two grades Medicare gives. Medicare grades inspections on a curve inside each state, so those stars are a rank inside Iowa, not a national score.
All 12 nursing homes in Des Moines
Every Medicare-certified nursing home with a Des Moines address. The labels on each card come from Medicare’s own records. What each one counts is below.
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What the labels on each card mean
What a star means here
Medicare grades the inspection part of a star rating on a curve inside each state, so a star here is a rank against other Iowa homes, not a national score. Medicare withholds the rating altogether from homes on its Special Focus Facility list, so a withheld rating is a warning, not missing data.
Short on staffing
The home reports fewer nurse and aide hours per resident per day than a published research benchmark expects for the residents it actually has. The benchmark is not a Medicare figure: we work it out from the home's own Medicare case-mix score using the CASE formula (Harrington and others, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2025). It is not a legal limit, and there is no federal minimum number of nursing hours per resident per day.
Immediate jeopardy
The most serious result an inspection can have. It means inspectors found a resident was in danger of serious harm or death. A finding of actual harm is the level below that. Both are counts of inspection tags across the last three inspection cycles on record, not counts of separate incidents. Fines are federal penalties recorded between 2023 and 2026.
Abuse, counted two ways
There are two official measures and they do not agree. Medicare puts an abuse warning on a home's profile when abuse was found and a resident was harmed, or when it happened twice, and takes the warning off after a year. Separately, inspectors cite homes under the abuse, resident property and involuntary seclusion tags, and those findings stay on the record. A home can carry one label, both, or neither, so the two are labeled separately on every card.
The Special Focus list
Medicare's list of homes with a persistent record of serious problems. Each state gets a small number of places on it. A candidate is a home in line for one of those places.
Polk County has 30 Medicare-certified nursing homes. The 18 outside Des Moines are in Ankeny (4), Johnston (3), Urbandale (3), West Des Moines (3), Altoona (2), Grimes (1), Pleasant Hill (1) and Polk City (1).