Winchester Gardens

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home excelled in our nursing score. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. When determining our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This exemplary nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes fared better in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Amazingly, we also awarded this nursing home yet another A+ in the area of inspections. Our inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The fourth area we scored was short-term care. This first-rate facility also dominated in this area, in which we gave it an A+. This wrapped up a spectacular report card of four A+'s. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.