Grace Living Center-Jenks

While we weren't high on this nursing home's overall score, it actually received an impressive long-term care rating this year. We gave it a B in this area. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Surprisingly, this nursing home actually received a good score in inspections as well. We awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Not many nursing homes that were this poor overall earned multiple category grades of this caliber. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had too many severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of B-. In calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care. This facility received an abysmal grade of F in this category. Our short-term care scores are believed to be more important for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Based on its score in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.