Will-O-Bell

This nursing home fared well in the category of long-term care, where it received an A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's second best category grade came in the area of government inspections. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't 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 always a good sign.

Moving on to the category of short-term care, this nursing home was awarded a grade of just D in that area. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most critical for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Given its score in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

This facility's least impressive area is nursing, which is the last category we analyzed. For this area, we awarded this facility a D. Our nursing grade features a number of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. To go along with its below average total nursing hours per resident, this place had really poor scores in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients having falls leading to major injury. This facility was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.