West Carroll Care Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless government inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection scores are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this facility a favorable score in long-term care. This nursing home earned a B+ in this category, which turns out to be one of our more favorable scores. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 51.778652 percent of its patients, which is a bit less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing rating is largely associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home didn't perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this was its poorest area. Our short-term care scores are presumably most meaningful for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. With a score in this range in this area, we were not stunned to learn this place was well below average in two of the key staffing figures we focus on. The facility supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.1 percent of its patients returning home.