Focused Care at Westwood

Although we weren't high on this nursing home's overall score, it received an impressive long-term care score this year. We gave it a B in this area. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.67105 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We were also pleasantly surprised to award this nursing home a relatively favorable health inspection score as well. We awarded it a respectable grade of B- in this category, which was much better than its overall grade. We would argue that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially focus on the severity of those deficiencies. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which is not an impressive grade. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Based on its poor rating in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place offers far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we analyzed is nursing, where this nursing home was given an abysmal score in this area as well. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This facility offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.