West Jefferson Health Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection ratings are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility also was awarded a strong long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we gave them a grade of B in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 87.465935 percent of its residents. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is not an impressive total. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility really did not fare very well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this is this facility's weakest area. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. As you might expect, we discovered that this facility offers substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.