Whispering Oaks Rehab & Nursing

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an A for the area of inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing score assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, while this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care. This nursing home received a very good short-term care rating in our assessment, with a grade of C. While this was not as impressive as several of its other category grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable score for this category. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.