Life Care Center of Kona

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with an impressive grade of A. With our short-term care assessment, we try to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility also excelled in inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category usually have few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. The nursing grade weighs several factors. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more often.

The final area we analyzed proved to be this nursing home's worst area. However, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of B- in long-term care. Our long-term care grades are more important for folks in need of more conventional assistance associated with activities of daily living. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 97.409325 percent of its residents. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.