Woodlands Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

To go along with its strong overall performance, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category grade. In this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing rating is based on many datapoints, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 Mississippi in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients at least once a day.

The next category we rated was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care rating in our assessment, with a B-. Even though this was not as impressive as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless a respectable score in this area. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is typically a meaningful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below average.