Westgate

On top of being an elite facility overall, this facility also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few places performed as well in this area. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, it does not look like we were able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home performed well in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of A for that area, which turns out to be one of our highest scores. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.6 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is far below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The last category we scored is short-term care. This nursing home received a very good short-term care score in our assessment, with a B-. While this was not quite as good as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless a respectable rating in that category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.