Linden Woods Village

Linden Woods Village is a small facility in Kansas City, Missouri. This facility was given an A- overall, which is one of the most impressive ratings we offer. A score of this caliber requires first-rate marks across the board. Even in a city with 32 nursing homes, this facility stood out. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection reports, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This exemplary facility also fared very well in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is typically a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. This facility provides more services with registered nurses and physical therapists than most facilities we looked at. This is an excellent sign. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 59.3 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. In computing our nursing scores, we factor in both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a decent long-term care rating. While this wasn't nearly as dominant as many of its other category grades, this is really not a terrible score. For prospective patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of offering above average levels of nursing care, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. This combination proved to be successful as this facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.