Avalon Care Center - Federal Way

We gave this nursing home an A for our short-term care grade. This is much more impressive than its overall score. Our short-term care grades are arguably most meaningful for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another one of this nursing home's stronger areas was in the category of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Nursing grades are largely associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home earned a solid inspection report this year as well, with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that category with a score of B-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The final area we scored is long-term care. We awarded this facility a D in our long-term care category, rendering this its weakest category grade. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is often a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 82.96297 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.