Westminster Healthcare Center

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below average. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning residents at least once a day.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care score and that actually wound up as its next most favorable score. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Considering its grade in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Among this facility's worst category grades was a lowly F for its inspection rating. More often than not, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspections. When a place has this bad of an inspection rating, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This nursing home had 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, we also need to point out that this place received large government fines in recent years amounting to more than $100,000. This usually signifies that a poor performance has been an issue for several years.

Turning to the final category, this facility really did not perform very well here either. With an abysmal grade of F in long-term care, this is really as bad as it gets. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 95.15739 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.