Wishek Living Center

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility has received near flawless inspections recently. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category usually have few severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. The nursing rating includes quite a few factors, however, the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Not many nursing homes fared better in this category. Short-term care grades are typically used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home received a very strong grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this score, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.41521 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.