Whester Care & Rehabilitation

Whester Care & Rehabilitation is a senior living facility located in Canal Winchester, Ohio, a city with 33,847 people. Our scoring scheme was not very kind to this nursing home, as it received an overall grade of F. Based on our assessment, this facility is not a good fit for anyone. Lastly, this nursing home's ownership changed in the last year, so we will need to monitor it to confirm it is able to raise its standard of care going forward.

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's low-end short-term care grade where it received a lowly F. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is generally a useful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score of this caliber in this category, we weren't stunned to discover this nursing home was below average in many staffing areas we assess. It provided substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength either for this nursing home. We found that just 46.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is below average.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's poor nursing grade where it received an F. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home averaged a meager 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily. On top of receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really pulled down this facility's nursing rating significantly.

The final category we rated is long-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated only 85.9287 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 1.42 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.