Whispering Heights

One of the reasons this place is a strong nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections is its best category. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded a very positive long-term care grade. In fact, this ended up being its second best category grade. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 95.454544 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing rating is based on a variety of subcategories. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we assessed is short-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. This facility did not turn out to have any weak links. In crafting these short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.