Whitewater Commons Senior Living

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an B+. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's third most favorable area is short-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this area. Short-term care grades are critical for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

The next area we rated ended up being this nursing home's weakest area. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it an acceptable grade of C for our long-term care category. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's assistance with daily living rather than the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.