Wheaton Village Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home also received a strong score in our long-term care category. We gave this facility a better than average grade of B in that area. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 85.253456 percent of its patients. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. The nursing rating weighs quite a few factors, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

The final area we scored is short-term care, which ended up being a low point for this facility. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in short-term care. Short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. With a grade of this caliber in this area, we were not shocked to learn that this facility was below average in the two key staffing figures we looked at. The nursing home offered significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below average.