Kinkora Pythian Home

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an C. Our nursing score features a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

This nursing home's next highest area turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it received a C. With our short-term care category, we strive to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The more important thing is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last category we scored is long-term care, which was a weak spot for this nursing home. We gave this facility a grade of just D in the area of long-term care. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.