Life Care Center of Westminster

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an elite grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing score is largely based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. It received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of B+. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. We were not able to locate information on deficiency's for this nursing home. We would like to have more data for this facility. Without having complete deficiency data, it ended up being a challenge to fully evaluate this nursing home in this area.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility was awarded an excellent long-term care grade. While this isn't quite as strong as several of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our stronger grades a facility can receive. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 71.9457 percent of its residents, which is somewhat lower than we anticipated. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.