Prairie Village Healthcare Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the category of long-term care, we gave this facility a grade of A- in that category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.55947 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also gave this facility a middle of the road grade in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. In determining these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

Moving on to our last category, this facility really did not perform well. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's worst category. In calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.