Westfield Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

We also gave this facility a respectable grade in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of B-. In determining our long-term care ratings, we scrutinize the personal care received by a nursing home's residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 83.283134 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is several points less than what we expected. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Turning to our last category, this nursing home was given a grade of C in short-term care, which we consider to be a decent score. In computing our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is generally a meaningful measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this place. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.