Kingsburg Center

This facility received favorable marks in the area of long-term care this year. We gave them a solid grade in that area, with a B+. This turned out to be the facility's top grade and helped its profile quite a bit. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Inspections is another area where this nursing home excelled. In fact, we awarded this facility an B+ for our inspections category. This score is far more impressive than its overall score. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. Nursing scores are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we rated was short-term care. For that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In computing these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. We were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.