Absolut Center for Nursing & Rehab Westfield

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our higher grades in that area, with an A. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection ratings are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's higher category scores was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 70.09967 percent of its patients, which is a few points less than we expected. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's second least favorable category is short-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that category. This is a well below average grade. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. We found that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the data we assessed. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home did not perform well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's poorest category. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is quite a bit below average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.