Willow Haven Nursing Home

This nursing home really fared well in the area of long-term care, with a grade of A+ in this category. This really propped up its overall score quite a bit. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 85.12397 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection grades are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Places that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not 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.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

This facility's weakest area was short-term care, which is the final category we scored. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a D. In computing these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.1 percent of its patients returning home.