Sharon Health Care Willows

Sadly, we did not have any favorable things to write about this nursing home's overall grade or its other ratings. Its best area is the area of inspections. However, with a D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. One of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Unfortunately, this facility received an F for its long-term care score. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the nursing home is not as well-staffed. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.304344 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Our next area we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility received an F. Short-term care ratings are critical for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Given its abysmal grade in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place provides far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to our next area, this facility didn't fare very well in this category either. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is about as as uninspiring as it gets. The nursing rating considers numerous factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating significantly.