Westphalia Hills-a Stonebridge Community

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection score was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it a grade of A. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we graded was long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a decent grade of B-. Long-term care grades are typically used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 97.68518 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored is nursing. We gave it a C in this area. This is a fair grade in this category. Our nursing rating weighs many components, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to ranking poorly in terms of nursing hours provided, this place also fell short in certain statistics that are tied to quality of care. This place's nursing rating was pulled down by poor performance in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers. In fact, we found that 16.12903 percent of this facility's residents sustained pressure ulcers. This is at least double the average nursing home.