Friends Homes West

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this area. Our inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few 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 deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note the fact that this facility was superb in our short-term care category. We awarded them a dominant grade of A+ in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 6.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing category consists of a handful of components, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we analyzed is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded an A-. This completed a very strong profile. Few facilities earned an A- or higher in every single category. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.