Westlake Village Care Center

On top of faring well overall, this nursing home also earned nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care ratings are probably more critical for residents requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

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+. The nursing score weighs several subcategories. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we rated is long-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a decent grade of B-. This actually ended up being this nursing home's least impressive area. Long-term care grades assess a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its patients, which is a very solid datapoint. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.