Elderwood at Williamsville

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the 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.

In addition, we also would like to note that this nursing home received favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in this category, with a grade of B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest grade. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.88393 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also awarded this facility a respectable score in the category of short-term care, with a C. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The final area we rated was nursing. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in nursing, rendering this the facility's least impressive area. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.