Weirton Medical Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is typically a fair measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing score is mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Tallying another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities fared better in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we analyzed, this nursing home received a very strong grade of A in our long-term care category. With this grade, the facility finished off a straight A profile. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. One of the data points we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. It does not appear that this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.