Willowbrook Terrace

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our long-term care category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.22222 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. 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 figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A. Nursing ratings are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also earned top notch inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with an impressive grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The last category we analyzed is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a B. Believe it or not, this was this facility's weakest category. A facility is doing something right when it's poorest grade still is superior to most nursing homes. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.