Kith Haven

While we graded this facility extremely poorly overall, it received a somewhat respectable nursing score this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. The nursing grade weighs a host of datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared to most facilities. Finally, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

This facility also didn't grade out too badly in the category of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which happens to be another one of its more respectable grades. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care instead of the skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 96.88196 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Interestingly, this nursing home's terrible overall score probably can't be attributed to its government inspection reports. We gave it a C for this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home had 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category J through L deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to place patient safety or health in imminent harm or jeopardy. We are also concerned by the fact that this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

Turning to the next area, this facility didn't perform well in this area either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.