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.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing scores are largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning our third category, this nursing home received first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category, this facility also was given a very strong short-term care score, with an A. This finished off a first-rate profile. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who 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 facility on a permanent basis.