Kirkland Court Health and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of A- for our long-term care score. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 73.88535 percent of its residents. This is a few points below what we anticipated. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for that area. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. The nursing score is based on several datapoints, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this area. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving patients more frequently.

Turning to our fourth area, this nursing home was given a respectable short-term care score of C. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a reliable measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. We weren't able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.