Sitka Community Hospital-Ltc

On top of earning a strong overall score, this facility excelled in our inspections category, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its strong resume, this nursing home also was awarded a superb short-term care grade, with a grade of A. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is considered to be a meaningful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home averages 0.8 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In our last category, we gave this facility a grade of A for our long-term care rating. This finished off an elite profile. Facilities that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.