Towne Manor West

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of C in the area. Our nursing grade is primarily based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in this category. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Unfortunately, this facility vaccinated just 49.715908 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The next area we scored is short-term care. This facility was given a very poor grade of F in that area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is considered to be a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.