Western Horizons Care Center

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing grade. We awarded them a grade of A- in this category. The nursing rating weighs a handful of factors, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also was given an impressive short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home received a very good government inspection report this year as well. For this reason, it received one of our higher scores in that category with a B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

The final area we graded was long-term care. We gave this facility one of our more favorable grades in this area, with a grade of B. This facility turned out to be very solid in all areas we analyzed. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.354836 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.