Northwest Manor Health Care Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive grade in inspections. Inspections ended up being its best category. In this area, we gave this nursing home an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a fine short-term care grade. Indeed, this is this nursing home's second strongest category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Additionally, this nursing home also was awarded favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the last category, this facility also was awarded a very strong nursing grade, with a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our score in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.