Life Care Center of Westlake

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's next best area ended up being short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. Our nursing score is primarily based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is well below average. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

The last category we graded is long-term care, which is a weak link for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 90.39039 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.