Kansas Veterans Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of A for that category. Inspection ratings are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our next area, this facility was given a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.34984 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our final area, we gave this facility a grade of A for our short-term care score. This finished off a first-rate report card. In crafting our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.