Westwood Living Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care score. Indeed, long-term care ended up being its second best category score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care. We gave this facility a solid score in this category, with a C. Although this wasn't as favorable as several of its other scores, it is nevertheless not a bad grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is generally a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.