Providence Extended Care - Alaska

This facility received an elite short-term care score. We gave this nursing home an A- in this category, which really helped its overall score. In our short-term care category, we try to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. 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 also excelled in the area of nursing care, with an impressive grade of A- in this category. Nursing ratings are primarily based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Alaska in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a patient more often.

This nursing home's next best category turned out to be its long-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of C. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's personal care rather than the highly skilled therapy and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.765366 percent of its patients. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we looked at is inspections. Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. As a result, we had to give it an F in this category. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we tend to heavily weight negative feedback in this category. This really pulled down this facility's overall score. For places with poor inspection scores, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed one deficiency on its inspection report. Fortunately, it was not in a category that suggests that it caused a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home received large government fines recently of over $100,000. This often means that a facility's bad track record spanned several years.