Witham Extended Care

Witham Extended Care is a very-small government-owned facility located in Lebanon, Indiana. Sporting an overall rating of A+, this nursing home is ranked among the best nursing homes we assessed. In fact, we ranked this nursing home number 85 in the United States. This puts it in the top one percentile of all nursing homes. Headlining this facility's stellar profile is its short-term care score, which you can find in the next paragraph.

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grade is generally used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Indiana in this area with 71.9 percent of its patients returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A+. In computing our nursing scores, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 7.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is among the highest figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by these figures. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the country in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.

This facility also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Our inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final category we scored was long-term care. This remarkable nursing home also dominated in this area, where it received an A+. This topped off a spectacular profile of four A+'s. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.