Providence Extended Care - Alaska

In addition to earning a great overall score, this nursing home really excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an A. Few nursing homes did better in this area. When determining our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also performed favorably in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this category. Short-term care grades are often employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facilities next most favorable area was long-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack score in this category. Our long-term care grades are meaningful for residents needing personal care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 94.666664 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this nursing home didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We had to give it an F in this area. Since this information is compiled by independent government inspectors, we tend to heavily weight a poor performance in this category. This really dragged down this nursing home's overall grade. For nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection rating, we would scrutinize any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This facility had one deficiency by government inspectors. We were relieved to find that it was not in one of the categories that suggest that it created a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed significant government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This usually signifies that a nursing home's bad performance spanned multiple years.