Kahuku Medical Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive long-term care grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A-. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 80 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we anticipated but still a decent figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home also excelled in the short-term care category. We gave it a B+ for that category. This rounded out a very impressive report card. Our short-term care scores are important for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.