Althea Woodland

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an B. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents more often.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in our long-term care category as well, with a B. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 45.73171 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Our last category is short-term care, where we gave this nursing home a C in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.