Willow Terrace Rehabilitation and Nursing Center

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facilities second most favorable category is long-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. Long-term care grades are generally used to measure a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. We were concerned by the fact that this facility vaccinated just 80.58727 percent of its residents against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of C. Our nursing grade features a host of subcategories. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, while this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this area.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility really did not perform well in this area either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is really as bad as it gets. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.