Willows Center

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Our inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.1039 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. When calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, is this facility's weakest category. We gave this facility a D in that area. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. As you might expect, we discovered that this facility provides far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this facility's short-term care grade.