Kohala Hospital

The main thing propping up this nursing home's profile is its elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home a grade of A in that category. There are a host of subcategories within this area. Most of these factors reflect nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also want to note that this facility received a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it one of our highest scores in that category with a grade of A. Our short-term care scores are likely most meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also was awarded a favorable score in our long-term care category. We gave this facility an above average grade of B+ in that area. When nursing homes receive a score 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 after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 98.71795 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final category of inspections, we gave this facility just a D for our inspection category. This proved to be its worst category grade, particularly in light of some of the more impressive scores referenced above. Nevertheless, since this data is compiled by an independent government inspector, we weight it heavily in our overall grade. Our inspection scores factor in many items on the facility's inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the inspection reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed significant government fines recently of over $100,000. This often suggests that a bad performance spanned multiple years.