Willowdale Village

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this facility also received excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best grades in that area, with an A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its dominant achievements in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its short-term care score. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility also was given a high-end long-term care grade. In fact, this is this facility's third most impressive category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.12281 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our final area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for its nursing grade. This topped off a very strong report card. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this area. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as good measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.