The Westwood Manor

One of the reasons this place is a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections is its best category. In this area, we gave this facility an A. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, this facility also received favorable long-term care grades this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a score of B+. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing score includes a host of factors. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The next area we rated is short-term care, is this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. This is one of the couple of weak links in a strong profile. In computing these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.