Northwest Health and Rehabilitation Center

While we were not high on this facility's overall score, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

One of this facility's higher category scores came in the category of long-term care. This wound up being its second most respectable category. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. In crafting our long-term care grades, we quantify the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. After we finished assessing the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated just 88.06366 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses commit to patients as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provided just 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. On top of its weak nursing hours, this facility earned poor scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We found that a higher percentage of this nursing home's residents suffered falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this nursing home receiving a poor nursing score.

The next area we graded is short-term care. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is an abysmal grade. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Based on its grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse hours provided to its residents. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area, with just 26.9 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.