Willow Tree Healthcare Center

While we gave this facility a poor overall grade, we gave it a B for our inspections rating. This is due to the nursing home receiving a decent inspection report this year. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an F. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Sadly, this facility received an F for its short-term care score. Short-term care scores are meaningful for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its weak rating in this category, we weren't shocked to learn this place offers substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Switching gears to our last category, this nursing home really did not perform well in this category either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.60227 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.