Diversicare of Hutchinson

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. 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.

This nursing home also received a positive grade in our long-term care category. We gave this facility a better than average grade of B+ in that area. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 92.718445 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is a bit less than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Finally, 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's third most favorable category was short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. With our short-term care rating, we seek to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Moving on to the next category, we gave this facility a D for the area of nursing. This is the facility's worst category score. Sadly, this score hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. We weighed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is well below the national average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating significantly.