Life Care Center of Kansas City

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home fared well in long-term care. We awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 87.69231 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we were hoping for. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. We gave this nursing home a grade of B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

The last category we rated is short-term care. We gave this facility a C in this category. Short-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. It does not look like this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.