Friends Homes West

Friends Homes West is a very-small non-profit nursing home located in Greensboro, North Carolina. This nursing home is an A+ rated facility. Being awarded an A+ in our grading system requires excellent performance across the board. In spite of Greensboro featuring 12 other nursing homes to choose from, this nursing home stands out as a first-rate option. This nursing home also received phenomenal grades in each of our categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider 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.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its short-term care score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Remarkably, this nursing home provides approximately 50% more hours of services from registered nurses and physical therapists than most facilities we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 57.7 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Moving on our next area, this facility was awarded an excellent long-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A in that area. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the factors we considered on top of this facility's quality nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly. This combination proved to be successful as this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last category, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for our nursing rating. This wrapped up a first-rate profile. The nursing score analyzes many data points, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides an incredible 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.