Wingate at Wilbraham

Although we were not high on this facility overall, we gave it a B for our nursing rating. This grade is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Our nursing grade is based on several factors. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility was given its second most favorable category score in the category of long-term care. We gave this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a decent score. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 88.13559 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly below what we expected. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest score was short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint 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 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection grade. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home had several deficiencies in categories G through L, which are among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Lastly, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed significant government fines in recent years of more than $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home's bad track record spanned several years.