Diversicare of Hutchinson

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave it an impressive grade of A in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other accomplishments is its superb long-term care grade. It received one of our strongest grades in that area, with a score of A-. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 90.09901 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we expected but still a decent figure. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also was given a favorable short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an above average score of B in this area. In our short-term care rating, we try to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next category we looked at is nursing, in which this facility was given a C. This is this nursing home's least impressive area. This is still not the end of the world. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.