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 should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facilities next best category was long-term care. We awarded it a B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average grade in this category. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.478874 percent of its patients, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Sadly, this nursing home's third highest score is short-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still performed somewhat poorly. Our short-term care scores are likely more important for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This nursing home's least impressive category was nursing, which is the final area we scored. We gave it an abysmal F in this category. In spite of a few solid scores in other areas, this grade is still disappointing so we would like to to point it out. Our nursing score assesses several data points, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.