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.

Additionally, we gave this facility an F in the area of short-term care. With our short-term care category, we seek to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. With its score in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. 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 quite a bit off the national average.

The next category we assessed was nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a major disappointment. The nursing rating weighs a handful of factors, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.