Wingate at Wilbraham

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our long-term care rating. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 81.56566 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit below the national average. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this nursing home's inspection grades where it received an F. This generally means we found some red flags on the inspection reports. With facilities that received this poor of an inspection score, we recommend scrutinizing the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home was hit with several category G through L deficiencies, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies found by the government inspectors had the potential to create actual harm to patients. Lastly, we would like to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines amounting to over $100,000. This often indicates that a facility'spoor performance spanned several years.

This facility ended up receiving a bottom of the barrel grade in our short-term care area. It received a lowly F in this category. In calculating these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. With a score of this caliber in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home was below average in many staffing metrics we looked at. It provided far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

The next area we scored was nursing. This facility received a poor grade of F in this area. We weighed the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these data points. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.