Northwest Health and Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that category, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's second best area is its short-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of C. Our short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage 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 nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. The nursing grade includes several datapoints, but the paramount one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, was this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. Facilities that do not score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 91.15282 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a decent figure. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.