Smith Center Health and Rehab

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Adding to its impressive resume, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it an B+ for that category. Nursing grades are primarily based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Kansas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care scores this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a grade of B. Facilities that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.28058 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, 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 was short-term care. For that category, we awarded this facility a grade of C. Short-term care grades are often employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.