Kalakaua Gardens

Kalakaua Gardens is located in Honolulu, Hawaii. This city is one of the largest cities in the country with has a population of 403,114 people. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the highest-rated facilities we assessed. A grade in this range requires top-notch scores across the board. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top fifth of all nursing homes in the United States. Headlining this facility's remarkable profile is its short-term care grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. This nursing home excelled in two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the typical facility. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Hawaii in this area with 65.9 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection grades are based on several items located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes 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 and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing rating analyzes many datapoints, however, the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of 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 predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last category we rated is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a solid score in this category, with a B-. While this isn't as strong as many of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. Long-term care grades are crucial for residents needing non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to offering favorable levels of nursing care and other staffing, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 97.402596 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.