Life Care Center of Wilbraham

Life Care Center of Wilbraham is one of just a couple available nursing homes located in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. This facility appears to be ranked among the better facilities we looked at. A grade in this range requires very strong marks across the board. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top third of all facilities in the United States. This nursing home's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection score, which you can find in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Contributing to its strong resume, this nursing home also was awarded a superb short-term care score, with a score of A. Our short-term care grades are probably most critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates more skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This place provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Massachusetts in this area with 63.9 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing ratings are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care, where this facility received a grade of B-. Even though this ended up being its weakest category score, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home'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 residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.433426 percent of its residents. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 1.54 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.