Northwest Hospital Center Subacute Unit

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections are virtually flawless. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate facility also dominated in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Only a small group of facilities performed better in this area. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 7.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. We looked at the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the last area, we gave this facility an A+ for its long-term care rating. This wrapped up a first-rate report card. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.