Westlake Village Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is generally a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation 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 having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

The next category we rated was long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. Believe it or not, this is this facility's least impressive category. A facility could be doing a lot worse when their lowest grade still is better than most nursing homes. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.