Weirton Medical Center

Weirton Medical Center is located in Weirton, West Virginia, a city with a total of 21,801 people. This facility is among the highest-graded facilities we found. In fact, it received our absolute highest grade. In fact, we ranked this nursing home number 173 in the United States. This puts it in the top two percentile of all facilities. Headlining this place's remarkable report card is its short-term care rating, which is addressed in the next section.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Remarkably, this facility provides about 1.5 times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. This is an excellent sign. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 71.6 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing grades are mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provides an incredible 7.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the nation when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

In the third area we looked at, this facility received strong marks in the category of long-term care. Consequently, it received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of of A+. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. We weren't able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding another A+ to its profile, we also awarded this nursing home yet another perfect score in the area of inspections. Straight A+'s is something only a handful of nursing homes in West Virginia achieved. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these 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 end up being quite minor. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.