Alderwood Manor

This facility really excelled in our short-term care rating. We gave it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest grades. This salvaged its overall profile. With our short-term care grade, we seek to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that category, which is one of our better scores. Our nursing grade is largely based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 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 nursing home Washington in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

The third area we assessed is long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a solid grade of C. In forming these long-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.44444 percent of its patients. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last category we looked at was inspections. This did not end up being one of this nursing home's stronger areas. We gave it a score of D in this category. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we typically take this one very seriously. Our inspection grades factor in many items on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. If you see severe deficiencies on the inspection reports, this is generally a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular facility was hit with 8 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 6 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.