West County Care Center

This nursing home's nursing rating was notably more impressive than its overall score. With a strong performance in this area, it earned one of our better scores in that category with a B+. The nursing rating weighs several datapoints. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 0.4 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's next best category is long-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. For long-term care residents, 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. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 85.71429 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be significantly lower than what we expected. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next best area we gave this nursing home in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The critical question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we assessed was inspections. This facility did not receive favorable government inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F in this category. This ended up pulling down this nursing home's overall grade quite a bit. For facilities with bad inspection ratings, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed large government fines in recent years amounting to more than $100,000. This typically signifies that a nursing home's poor performance has been an issue for multiple years.