Hilo Medical Center

Hilo Medical Center is a small hospital-based nursing home in Hilo, Hawaii. This turns out to be an A+ facility, which is the top rating. This nursing home proved to be one of the better facilities in Hilo, which has a strong selection of nursing homes. If you look below, you will see this place's category ratings, which are equally strong as its overall rating.

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. Our nursing score weighs many subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This place boasts a really impressive 5.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. This is among the higher totals of nursing hours we were able to find. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to 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, which is still very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on our third category, we gave this facility a score of A for our short-term care rating. This is a superb grade. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. This place performed as well as just about any nursing home in Hawaii in this area with 59.6 percent of its residents returning home.

In the last area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care rating. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of providing very impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.