Leahi Hospital is taking its ranking as one of the poorest performing nursing homes in the country very seriously, but administrators believe they have already fixed some identified problems at the long-term care facility.

The 190-bed facility was last inspected at the beginning of the year and already has implemented a corrective action plan approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which put together the list of 54 deficient nursing homes across the country.

"The Leahi staff and administrators are confident that significant progress has been made and will be reflected in the upcoming survey ... which is overdue," said Miles Takaaze, spokesman for the Hawaii Health Systems Corp., the quasi-public entity that administers the hospital.

"There was no evidence of direct harm to patients in our care and no civil penalties. Our admissions continue, and so does our funding from the feds," he said.

Most problems cited in the January CMS survey had to do with documentation, such as not recording what kind of therapeutic services a patient received.

Leahi Hospital should have been surveyed over the summer to determine whether the problems had been corrected, Takaaze said.

The inspection report posted on the Medicare Web site showed that the hospital's quality was better than average for the state, but it had nine health and safety violations that caused minimal harm or the potential for actual harm.

According to the Web site, all nine were corrected in March.

More serious violations could have led to a loss of federal funding and may have forced the hospital to stop accepting patients, Takaaze said.

The list of poorly performing nursing homes was released yesterday to push the facilities into making adequate — and permanent — improvements in areas cited by the surveyors.

"We take this listing and notice very seriously," Takaaze said. "We work in full compliance with the federal and state laws in an effort to protect and enhance the life of a patient in an institution."