Northwest Healthcare Center

Although we did not rate this facility well overall, we want to point out its decent grade of B- in the category of nursing. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

This facility was awarded its second best category grade in the area of short-term care. We awarded this facility a B- in this category, which is a respectable grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The critical question is whether this also affected quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents 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 nursing home's next best area ended up being its long-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of B-. In a long-term care environment, the 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 patients. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 63.13364 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit less than the national average. Fortunately, 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.

In the last category of inspections, this ended up being this facility's weakest link. Inspection grades are based on a nursing home's recent inspections. We gave this nursing home a D in this category, which is a very weak grade. Inspection grades factor in many items on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is generally the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This particular nursing home had 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.