Willow Creek Retirement Center

Although we did not have many favorable things to say about this nursing home's overall grade, it did receive a respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent score in this category with a B-. Our inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of B- in the area. When computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's next most favorable category was its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a B-. Our short-term care grade is often employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

Moving on to our last category, this facility was awarded a respectable long-term care score of B-. Our long-term care grades are more meaningful for patients in need of more traditional services related to personal care. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, this nursing home vaccinated just 90.17544 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.