Avamere at Pacific Ridge

While we didn't give this facility a good overall grade, we actually gave it a very strong grade in nursing, where it received a B. This is better than most nursing homes in this area. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of B- for our inspections rating. This score is a more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We believe that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only earned a D for its long-term care grade, which is not one of our better scores. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 77.375565 percent of its residents. This is several points lower than the national average. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The final category we looked at is short-term care, in which this facility was given a very poor score in this category as well. It received an F for this area, which is obviously very concerning. Short-term care scores are meaningful for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.