Willows Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Our inspection scores are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home truly excelled in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Not many nursing homes performed better in this category. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.192986 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing scores also consider quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

This facility's weakest category was short-term care, which is the final category we analyzed. For this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. It appears that this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.