Kanawha Community Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility received elite marks in the area of long-term care. Consequently, it was given one of our best grades in that area with a score of A+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing score consists of several components, however, the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final area, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for our short-term care rating. This finished off a very impressive report card. In determining our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.