Alderwood Park Health and Rehabilitation

This facility excelled in our short-term care rating, with an A in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving patients more often.

Unfortunately, this facility did not receive a favorable inspection grade. We gave it a D in this area. This was off the pace of this nursing home's other grades. Inspection grades relate to a nursing home's government inspections. Our inspection grades weigh many items found on the facility's recent inspection reports. If you see too many deficiencies on the reports, this is generally a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with multiple category G through L deficiencies, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies identified by CMS had the potential to cause actual harm to residents. Lastly, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed large government fines totaling over $100,000. This often signifies that a facility's poor performance spanned several years.

Switching gears to the final area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in long-term care. This is the facility's weakest category grade. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.