Westwood Nursing Center

Westwood Nursing Center is a small facility in stateboro, Georgia. With an overall rating of B, this is a fine nursing home. This place definitely has plenty working in its favor. The best aspect of this facility's strong profile was its inspection score. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A+ for this area, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection grades are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Adding to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this category. Our short-term care scores are probably more important for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that it performed better than most nursing homes in the country with 49.4 percent of its patients returning home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Nursing ratings are primarily based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Although this place didn't have as many nursing hours as many of the other nursing homes we assessed, it was still better than average in the area of avoiding falls.

The next category we scored is long-term care, which was this facility's weakest area. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. Naturally, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.