Medicalodges Paola

While we were not high on this place overall, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections category. This grade is much more impressive than the place's overall grade. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid facilities that have a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home received its next best category grade in the category of short-term care. We gave this facility a C in this area, which is a decent grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is not an impressive total. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

The last category we looked at was long-term care, in which this nursing home was given a very poor score in this area as well. It received a lowly F in this category, which is definitely a major disappointment. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the vaccine to only 89.328064 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.