Life Care Center of Kona

Life Care Center of Kona is an average-sized nursing home located in Kailua Kona, Hawaii. This nursing home is an A+ rated facility. Being awarded an A+ in our grading system requires excellent performance across the board. As far as we can see, this facility looks like a great choice for most people. This nursing home also received phenomenal scores in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. In our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility provided about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average facility. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Hawaii in this area with 61.4 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also received an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. Our inspection ratings are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a very strong long-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being this nursing home's third most impressive category grade. In that area, this facility received a grade of A. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.55752 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.24 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility rounded out a straight A profile. There are numerous factors included in this area. Many of the criteria relate to staffing levels. This nursing home provides an impressive 3.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Out of this total, more than one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. We add more weight to hours provided by skilled nurses in calculating our nursing grades. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving residents more often.