Kings Daughters Medical Center

Kings Daughters Medical Center is a very-small hospital-based facility located in Ashland, Kentucky. Sporting an overall score of A-, this nursing home is one of the better facilities we looked at. Not surprisingly, this is actually the highest rated facility in the city. This nursing home's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection rating, which we will address in the next section.

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also received an A+ inspection rating. This is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can offer a facility. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, this is this facility's second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our short-term care scores are crucial for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. The facility provided approximately one and a half times as many physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical 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 to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Kentucky in this area with 69.3 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our more positive scores in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we scored was nursing, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This actually ended up being this facility's weakest area. This is nevertheless not a terrible score. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day. At least one fourth of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. This is a high ratio of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours heavily in computing our ratings. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.