Whiting Health Care

This facility earned a strong overall score as described above, but we wanted to point out its excellent long-term care grade. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its impressive profile, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with a score of A. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider 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.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. 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. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses spend with residents as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B-. While this turned out to be its poorest category rating, this is still not the end of the world. With our short-term care grade, we try to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.