Windcrest Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Although we were not complementary of this nursing home's overall performance, it did receive an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that category with a B+. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that have a long list of deficiencies. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's second most favorable category is its long-term care grade, where it was given a C. Our long-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 72 percent of its residents. This is significantly less than the national average. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's second lowest score was short-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a well below average score. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Based on its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This facility's least impressive area was nursing, which is the final category we looked at. For this category, we gave this nursing home a D. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.