Life Care Center of Westminster

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home really excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an A. Few facilities fared better in this category. Our short-term care scores are arguably more important for individuals needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing score consists of a handful of factors, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it excelled in inspections, with a B in that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. We weren't able to find deficiency data for this facility. Without deficiency data for this facility, it is a challenge to fully evaluate it in terms of this category.

The next category we looked at was long-term care, is this facility's weakest category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. This is one of the few dings in a strong profile. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care may not provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this facility vaccinated only 87.449394 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.