Altercare Post-Acute Rehab Center

Altercare Post-Acute Rehab Center is one of just a couple available nursing homes located in Kent, Ohio. This facility is ranked among the highest-rated facilities we assessed. It was given one of the highest grades that we offer. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top 20 percent of all nursing homes in the nation. One of the major highlights of this facility's stellar profile is its inspection reports. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this place a grade of A+ for our inspection category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. We were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without the information regarding deficiencies for this nursing home, it is difficult to evaluate it in the area of inspections.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are often employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This facility offered more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 72.7 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses commit to residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per patient daily. At least one quarter of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. This is a high percentage of skilled nursing care. In determining our ratings, we apply additional weight to care provided by registered or licensed nurses. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we analyzed was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a decent score in this category, with a grade of B-. Although this isn't as high as some of this nursing home's other scores, it is still nothing to be ashamed of. In the category of long-term care, we focus on the quantity of care offered by a facility, rather than more sophisticated services. After considering the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.