Countryside Health Center

Countryside Health Center is in Topeka, Kansas. The city has a total of 163,415 people. This is a good nursing home with a B overall. This was right in line with the city grade in Topeka. Even in a city of 15 other nursing homes, this one should be a quality selection. Fortunately, this facility didn't have any poor grades in any of the major categories discussed below. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.42857 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 1.31 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

This nursing home received its next highest category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. Our short-term care grade is generally used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Moving on to the final area, this facility was awarded a grade of B- in nursing, which is a decent score. There are quite a few criteria included in this grade. Many of the subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 1.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.