Sitka Community Hospital-Ltc

Sitka Community Hospital-Ltc is a very-small non-profit nursing home located in Sitka, Alaska. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded facilities we assessed. This nursing home received one of the most impressive scores that we offer. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we rated it as one of the top five facilities in Alaska. Finally, we wanted to point out that there was an ownership change at this facility in the last 12 months. We will need to make sure it maintains its high grades going forward.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an impressive nursing score. In this category, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing rating is largely associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided 7.6 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This was one of the highest totals we found. In addition, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its residents suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this facility performed as well as any facility Alaska.

This nursing home also was dominant in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Very few nursing homes performed better in this area. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the datapoints we considered on top of this facility's quality nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 97.77778 percent of its residents. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for seniors. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on our next category, this facility received an excellent short-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A- in this category. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more important for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it provides more care from registered nurses than most facilities. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. We awarded it a grade of A- for that category. This completed its straight A report card. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.