Knolls West Post Acute

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of B-. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility also didn't perform terribly in the category of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of C in that category, which ended up being among its higher scores. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Sadly, this nursing home's next best score is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed somewhat poorly. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 94.014084 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we graded is nursing, where this facility received an abysmal score in this area also. It received an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. There are many factors within this category. Most of the factors reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this datapoint.