Whester Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this place turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this critical area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we have information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also received a superb short-term care score, with a score of A. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also excelled in this area. In fact, we awarded it a of A for the area. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to the final area, this facility also excelled in our nursing category. We awarded it an A for that category. This rounded out a straight A profile. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident more often.