TLC West Nursing & Rehabilitation

While we were fairly low on this facility overall, we awarded it a grade of A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care rating and that actually ended up being its next best score. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 86.309525 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. With its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we looked at. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The next category we graded is nursing, in which this facility was given a rock bottom score in this category also. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.