Avamere Rehabilitation of Cascade Park

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. In computing these short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. There are quite a few datapoints included in this grade. Most of the subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility earned a grade of B for its inspections rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

The final area we analyzed is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B-. While this turned out to be its lowest category rating, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 96.875 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.