Willis-Knighton Extended Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. It does not look like we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note the fact that this nursing home performed remarkably in our short-term care category. We gave them an elite grade of A+ in this area. Short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The fourth category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility received an A. This completed a very impressive profile. Not many nursing homes earned an A- or better in all four categories. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We weren't able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.