Whester House

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it really excelled at short-term care. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our best grades. In calculating these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also awarded this facility a grade of B- for our nursing rating. Nursing grades are primarily based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more often.

Among this facility's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection score. Typically, this means we found some red flags on the nursing home's inspection reports. For facilities with poor inspection scores, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was assessed a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Lastly, we would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently of more than $50,000. This generally signifies that inspectors grew tired after multiple years of bad health inspections.

The last category we analyzed is long-term care, where this nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade here also. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is definitely very concerning. Facilities that do not fare well in this category typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated only 85.8 percent of its patients, which is a bit of a concern. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.