Meridian Rehabilitation and Health Care Center

Meridian Rehabilitation and Health Care Center is an average-sized facility in Wichita, Kansas. This nursing home was given an overall grade of F. We ranked this as one of the bottom five rated facilities in Wichita. With more than 20 other nursing homes in the city, you may simply want to look elsewhere. More information on this nursing home's category grades is available below. Its best category was nursing, which is discussed in the next section.

Even though we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a C for our nursing category. Our nursing rating consists of a handful of components, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This place provides 2.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next most respectable score was short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared somewhat poorly. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is generally a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. With a score this poor in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place was below average in multiple staffing figures we assess. The facility provided far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 32.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this facility's short-term care score.

We wanted to point out that this facility received a lowly F for its inspection score. An F in this category is alarming because it usually points to red flags on the nursing home's government inspection reports. For places with bad inspection grades, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular facility had 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 21 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home really did not perform well in this area either. Due to an abysmal grade of F in long-term care, this is really as bad as it gets. Facilities that do not 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 healthcare services we looked at. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility provided the vaccine to just 87.41936 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.7 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.