Area nursing home receives top rating

A nursing home in Girard received the highest score possible when the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed its inaugural quality ratings late last month.
The Heritage in Girard received Crawford County's only five-star rating in the study that rated each of the nation's 15,800 nursing homes that participate in Medicare or Medicaid. The Heritage received a five-star overall rating, four stars for health inspections, three stars for staffing and five stars for quality measures.
Heritage owner Dave Twarog said he was pleased to receive the high rating, adding "it's something we've been striving for for quite some time."
"We're really proud of the five-star rating," he said. "I think it helps families when they decide to put a person into a nursing home. It's one of the few tools you can use to make that decision. Looking at how Medicare rates you might help."
In a statement on the CMS Web site, Acting Administrator Kerry Weems said the rating system was developed to provide families an assessment of nursing home quality.
"The new information will help consumers and families identify important questions to ask nursing homes and challenge nursing homes to improve their quality of care," Weems said.
Medicalodge South in Pittsburg received an overall four-star rating and Mt. Carmel's nursing home program received three stars. Cornerstone Village, Deseret Nursing and Rehabilitation in Arma and Sunset Manor in Frontenac each received two-star ratings.
Golden Living Center in Pittsburg received the area's only one-star rating, but executive director Pat Cranston said that rating may be a little misleading.
"When reviewing these ratings, it's important to understand that CMS does not consider a nursing home's current level of performance," Cranston said. "It focuses on past information in the Nursing Home Compare database. Our Living Center has recently implemented a number of quality-of-improvement initiatives and we are seeing positive results.
"Our rating is not as high as we would like, but we are confident that our current quality initiatives will improve our survey performance and we'll move up in future ratings," Cranston said.
In this first round of quality ratings, approximately 12 percent of the nation's nursing homes received a five-star rating, while 22 percent received a one-star rating.