Sunporch Dodge City

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care scores this year. Indeed, we awarded it one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 65.38461 percent of its patients. This is a few points below what we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing grade is largely associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next category we scored is short-term care. This nursing home was given a grade of B- for this area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.