Witham Extended Care

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is frequently a meaningful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This grade is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing score includes quite a few components, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient at least once a day.

The last category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was awarded an A. This wrapped up a very favorable report card. Very few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in every category. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.