Wedgewood Healthcare Center

Even though we gave this facility an abysmal overall score, we gave it a B- for our nursing rating. When computing our nursing ratings, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, while this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this area.

This facility's second best category was inspections, but even there it earned a D. This is still a very poor grade. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. You should be most cautious when considering a facility with severe deficiencies on a recent inspection report. This facility had 9 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to patient health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this place received large government fines totaling more than $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home'spoor performance has been an issue for multiple years.

Our next category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home was given an F. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most important for those requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its score in this area, we weren't stunned to learn that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.

The final category we scored was long-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. When facilities 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 with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to only 74.25742 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.