Willowbend Living Center

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with an A+. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outpaced most nursing homes in this area. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 93.52518 percent of its residents. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this facility received just a D in this area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We found that this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

Moving on to our fourth area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for nursing. This was the nursing home's weakest category grade. Naturally, this category hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its weak nursing hours, this nursing home also received poor scores in many of the quality-based measures we considered in calculating our nursing grades. We found that more of this place's patients sustained falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this facility receiving a poor nursing grade.