Whester Care & Rehabilitation

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are with patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This place provides only 0 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

We were also surprised to discover that this nursing home earned a reasonably solid short-term care score this year. We awarded it a B- in that area. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. The facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

This facility ended up receiving a rock-bottom score in our long-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this category. Nursing homes that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we looked at. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 91.10629 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection grade. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with 8 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.