Whispering Springs Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means 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. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Sadly, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care grade, which is not a very good score. In our short-term care score, we try to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Considering its score in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The final area we analyzed is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. Sadly, it received an F for this category, which is certainly very disappointing. The nursing category weighs many factors, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home offered only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.