Kirkland Court Health and Rehabilitation Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this facility's more favorable category grades was in the category of long-term care. This proved to be its second most favorable category. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a C. Long-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's amount of nursing care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 59.638554 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. Nursing grades are largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

Our next category is short-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C in that category. Short-term care grades are generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The question is whether this also impacted quality of care. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.