Misty Willow Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place 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 CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's next most favorable area is its short-term care score, where it was given a B-. In crafting these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. It offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 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.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care score. This is not a score to write home about. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective 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 residents. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average total. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we scored was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor grade. This is obviously a major concern. In computing a facility's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility was above average in two of the major metrics we considered, with good scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.