Whester House

While this nursing home's overall grade wasn't great, it surprisingly earned a good grade for short-term care. We gave it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. This was a rare highlight in an otherwise lacking profile. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an B. Our nursing category is based on quite a few factors, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Among this facility's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection grade. More often than not, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed one category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by the government inspectors had the potential to pose actual harm to patients. Lastly, we also want to point out that this facility was assessed large government fines recently of over $50,000. This often signifies that CMS inspectors became fed up after several years of bad health inspections.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this nursing home really did not perform well here either. With an abysmal grade of F in long-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.726166 percent of its residents, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.