Hale Makua - Kahului

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. Our short-term care ratings are likely more important for folks needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 7.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A. Our nursing score is primarily associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

This nursing home earned a B for its inspections score. This is an above average grade in this category. Inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The final area we scored is long-term care. We gave this facility a decent grade in this area, with a C. Even though this wasn't as high as several of its other grades, it is still not a major area of concern. In the category of long-term care, we analyze the amount of services provided by a facility, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 89.86111 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly below what we expected. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.