Wellbrooke of Westfield

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing actually ended up being its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing category is based on a handful of datapoints, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, which is this facility's least impressive area. We gave this facility a grade of D in this area. However, we wouldn't assess this nursing home based only on one bad category, since it was awarded many impressive scores in other categories. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the nursing home is not as well-staffed. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 92.76316 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.