West Hill Health and Rehab

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second most impressive category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 9.803922 percent of its patients. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. When determining our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below the national average. Finally, while this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic.

The final area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a solid grade in this area, with a grade of B-. Even though this wasn't as high as several of its other scores, it is still not a terrible score. Our short-term care scores are presumably more important for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.