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.

Adding to its dominant profile, this nursing home also performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, it received a score of A for that area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.612404 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Nursing grades are largely associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

The final category we looked at was short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B-. This ended up being this facility's weakest category. This is nevertheless not the end of the world. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It does not appear that this facility provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.