Westminster Commons

Westminster Commons is an average-sized nursing home located in Atlanta, Georgia. We gave it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the road rating. This grade is not too far off the city grade for Atlanta, which is a B-. One of the highlights of this facility's report card is its impressive long-term care rating, which you can find in the next section.

This nursing home really fared well in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it an impressive grade of A- for that category. This salvaged its overall profile. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 62.040817 percent of its residents. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.46 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned a grade of B. There are numerous datapoints included in this area. Many of these criteria reflect staffing levels. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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.

We also awarded this nursing home an impressive score in short-term care. This facility earned a grade of B in this area, which happens to be one of our higher grades. In the category of short-term care, we strive to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the nursing home. This was more of a strength for this nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Georgia with 58 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning the last category of inspections, this facility really did not fare well. Sadly, it received an F in this category. This dragged this facility's overall score down as we heavily weight this category. With nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection grade, we recommend scrutinizing the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This nursing home had one category J or K deficiency, which are among the worst deficiencies. This generally means that the government inspectors identified a deficiency which puts resident safety or health in immediate danger. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received large government fines in recent years amounting to more than $100,000. This often indicates that a poor performance spanned multiple years.