Westlake Village Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Our inspection ratings are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

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. Our nursing grade assesses several subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident more frequently.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home received an impressive nursing rating this year, with a grade of B. Although this wasn't nearly as good as some of its other grades, this is still one of our more favorable scores in that area. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. 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 number.