Westminster Village

With an address in Bloomington, Illinois, Westminster Village is one of six available nursing homes in the city. This nursing home turns out to be a grade A facility, which is a dominant grade. In fact, we were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it as one of the top three nursing homes in Bloomington. If you scroll down, you will see this facility's category ratings, which are also strong.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our short-term care category. With our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This place performed respectably with 46 percent of its residents returning home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning the page to our third area, this nursing home was given a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of providing elite levels of nurse staffing, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. This combination proved to be effective as this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we rated, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this grade, the nursing home topped off a very impressive report card. Our nursing grade considers many subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This place provides an incredible 7 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.