Medicalodges Paola

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid facilities that had too many deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The second most favorable area we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a C. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is considered to be a meaningful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

This facility's second lowest category is long-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that category. This is a well below average score. Facilities that don't score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 93.41564 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.

This nursing home's worst category was nursing, which is the last category we assessed. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. When determining our nursing ratings, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This place averaged just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This statistic is significantly below average. On top of its weak nursing hours, this facility received suboptimal marks in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We found that more of this place's patients suffered falls leading to major injury.