McCrite Plaza Topeka

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an A. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is considered to be a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's inspections. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their 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 deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home also received a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.297295 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we graded is nursing. We awarded this facility one of our higher scores in this area, with a grade of B. Although this was not as favorable as several of its other scores, it is nevertheless a fine score. Our nursing rating analyzes several data points, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.