Willow Ridge Healthcare

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong facility is that it received a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections is its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home also received a grade of B for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 90.32258 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we rated was this nursing home's poorest area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still gave it an acceptable grade of C for our short-term care category. Our short-term care ratings are likely more meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.