Senior Care of Western Hills

To pair with its decent overall score, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our inspections rating. This is far better than the facility's overall grade. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note that this facility received a strong long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it one of our best scores in this area with a grade of A. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.618324 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place 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 an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we gave this nursing home an F. This is certainly not one of this facility's better areas. When determining a facility's nursing score, we consider the amount of time nurses spend with residents as well as the skill levels of those nurses. With just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive category. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is certainly concerning. Our short-term care grades are crucial for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.