Prairie Village Nursing and Rehabilitation

To go along with its favorable overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for the area of inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Another quality feature for this facility is that it was awarded an impressive short-term care score. In fact, this wound up being its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a B+. Short-term care grades are generally employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing rating weighs several subcategories, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Switching gears to the final area, this nursing home was given a C in long-term care, which is generally a respectable grade. Our long-term care grades are based in part on the facility's amount of nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. This facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.