Schowalter Villa

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also received A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections were virtually perfect. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. The nursing rating is based on a number of datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 Kansas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident more often.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was given a dominant score of A in our long-term care category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.64162 percent of its residents. This is a bit below what we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we looked at, this nursing home received a very favorable grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a very impressive report card. With our short-term care grade, we endeavor to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home 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 last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.