Weirton Medical Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ in short-term care. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is considered to be a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. This nursing home is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. It offered about one and a half times as many physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. This is what we look for when grading a nursing home in this category. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 67.9 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing grade is mostly based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This was one of the better figures we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the state in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility was given a highly favorable long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.