Wilshire at Lakewood

Wilshire at Lakewood is a large nursing home located in Lees Summit, Missouri. It looks like this nursing home is one of the higher-graded facilities we assessed. A score in this range requires very strong scores across the board. In fact, we were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it as the best nursing home in Lees Summit. The best aspect of this facility's strong report card was its long-term care score. Long-term care grades are discussed in the next section

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.799194 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. This place was also able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 1.61 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. There are several subcategories included in this area. Most of the factors reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This nursing home fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided with better nursing care.

Additionally, this nursing home also was awarded favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B+. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is frequently a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. This place fared better than most facilities in this area with 50.3 percent of its residents returning home.

Completing its excellent profile, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections. We awarded it a score of B+ for that category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.