Wichita ? Kansas officials are defending health care in Wichita after the city was named the nation’s worst place to be in a nursing home.

The designation came from HealthGrades, an organization that reports on the quality of health-care facilities nationwide.

But state health officials say that doesn’t mean nursing home residents are at risk, or that Wichita’s nursing homes are bad. Instead, they say, the numbers reflect the diligence with which inspections are carried out in Kansas.

HealthGrades analyzed four years of health inspection and complaint reports to determine the best and worst cities for nursing home care. On Monday it released the results, which are only through 1997, the most recent year with available data.

Wichita was at the top of the list, with 80 percent of the its nursing homes having four or more “actual harm” violations in the past four years. In contrast, 57 percent of the facilities in Nashville, Tenn., had no actual harm violations.

Actual harm violations mean that a Medicare or Medicaid regulation was violated and that a resident’s care was compromised in some way as a result. Almost one-third of all nursing homes in the United States had at least one actual harm violation in the past 12 months, HealthGrades said. In Kansas, the figure was 32.7 percent.

The HealthGrades report is based on regular nursing home inspections by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and on inspections conducted any time a complaint is filed.

The report should be reason for concern in Wichita, said Peter Fatianow, a HealthGrades spokesman.

“We looked at every city in the country that had 20 or more nursing homes. There’s something going on there” in Wichita, Fatianow said.

But Joe Kroll and Mike Heideman of KDHE and Gloria Simpson, a regional long-term-care ombudsman for the state, said each state has its own inspectors, so the information being compared might not be the same, even though all inspectors use the same federal regulations.

In Kansas, a recent Legislative Post-Audit report on nursing home inspection found no fundamental flaws in the process.

“We’re doing a good job of citing deficiencies,” Kroll said.