Arboretum of Winnie Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our long-term care grade. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.07 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively minor. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we graded is short-term care, which was this facility's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is certainly a bit of a concern. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.