CareCore at Willowood’

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also received A+ inspections in recent years. Its inspections are nearly flawless. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an B+. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a score of B. It outperformed most facilities in this area. Our short-term care grades are probably most meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our better scores in this category, with a B. This nursing home ended up being very solid in all areas we analyzed. For long-term care residents, the facility's 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. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 92.36948 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is a bit lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.